This has been an interesting battle in terms of civil governance. Basically Uber & Lyft threatened to put the initiative they wrote, on the ballot if the legislature passed AB5, which they did.
Uber and Lyft are now doing everything they can to get it to pass which will set up its own court fight.
Watching this fight I wonder "Who is in charge of governing California?" is it the Legislature/Governor or is it special interests who can spend enough to put bespoke laws into effect and make bespoke changes to the state constitution?
California didn't help itself when it implemented term limits which had the unpleasant side effect of never having any legislators with enough experience in the job to know how to really get things done, and so the "work" of writing laws has also fallen to special interests. This has never been more clear than the last 4 years where California has had a single party in both houses, and a Governor and still cannot legislate anything that special interests oppose.
I don't know what the "solution" would be but it does not feel like it is serving the people of California well (as someone who lives here).
> Watching this fight I wonder "Who is in charge of governing California?" is it the Legislature/Governor or is it special interests who can spend enough to put bespoke laws into effect and make bespoke changes to the state constitution?
Neither.
It's the people, who, after all the spending choose both the legislature and the governor, and choose the results ofinitiatives and referenda, and who have, on making all those choices, time and again defied the balance of spending.
> California didn't help itself when it implemented term limits which had the unpleasant side effect of never having any legislators with enough experience in the job to know how to really get things done, and so the "work" of writing laws has also fallen to special interests.
Special interests have proposed and drafted laws and offered them up to the legislature since long before term limits, legislators (both before and after term limits) do draft their own a decide which, wherever they originate, to support, either as written or with amendments. And while term limits as implemented in CA do overall moderately weaken the elected legislators compared to unelected interests (professional staff as well as lobbying groups), it's a fairly modest effect; the median legislator is probably about as strong as before, but no one builds up the kind of institutional power that someone like Willie Brown had.
> This has never been more clear than the last 4 years where California has had a single party in both houses, and a Governor and still cannot legislate anything that special interests oppose.
This is obviously untrue in the literal sense, as most legislation has special interests both supporting and opposing and plenty has passed in the last four years.
If you mean it in some non-literal sense, then I can't fathom exactly what that might be.
There is an old sailor's joke about who do you believe when the sailor on the deck says, "there is no land in sight" and the one in the crow's nest says "land off the starboard bow."
The wisdom in the joke is that both are correct from their own point of view but as a matter of trust, you want to go with the point of view with the person who has a better view of the bigger picture.
Representative forms of government have always relied on the chosen representative spending their time and energy to understand an issue and its relative merits and, with the understanding of what the people who elected them value, choosing the right path. They are "in the crow's nest" in this scenario.
Imagine a hospital scenario where the doctor announces your symptoms over the public address system and then all of the other patients in the hospital vote on your course of treatment. And the patients are voting while treatment company representatives walk around and tell misleading stories about how effective their particular drug or therapy is in treating what ever ailment has just been announced over the PA.
Of course in theory you choose your doctor based on the fact that they spent 12 years studying for their certification in medicine and perhaps their experience in treating cases like yours. You don't go to the hospital to hear what the other patients think you should do.
But even in this ridiculous scenario, the other patients can be sincere in their desire that you get better, and so will passionately advocate for vendor X's treatment if they believe that vendor X has the best treatment.
And as a result, your care stops being about finding the right treatment to a disease or condition, and becomes convincing the largest number of patients that an answer could be the right answer.
From my perspective, living as I do in California for many years, my perspective is that I don't think the people of California are well served by this state of affairs.
I think state wide referendums are bad because (and only because) people won't educate themselves and vote the way they "believe" as determined by their "gut feeling" as opposed to real research. I actually trust politicians more to make laws like these.
There are different representative forms of government, and their priorities are correspondingly different. What you describe is more or less the basis on which US was organized back in the day. However, by the time the West Coast states were being settled and granted statehood, there was a pushback against elitism in government, and more interest in direct democracy. Which is why those states ended up with extensive provisions for referendums written into their constitutions. If the citizens of California decide that it's not in their interest to govern themselves directly, they can always amend the constitution to remove those provisions.
> And it's a bit insulting to say California voters don't have the wherewithal to digest political advertisements and make their own decisions.
On top of this, voters don’t even need to digest political advertisements. The state sends a booklet that describes all the proposition, the pro position, rebuttals to the pro position, the con position and rebuttals to the con position, plus how much money was spent from each side, plus who made those contributions. All there, in black and white, in your mailbox.
Unpopular opinion, but I think we're giving a little too much credit to the average voter. There are a lot of low-information voters out there who don't pour through the booklets and published rebuttals and rebuttals to the rebuttals. Media saturation works. It doesn't always work, and you can always go back and find exceptions, even some very high profile ones, but if it didn't work in general, we wouldn't see so much money pouring into political advertisements. There's a reason we track and measure campaigns by counting dollars spent.
> but if it didn't work in general, we wouldn't see so much money pouring into political advertisements.
We might, because professional political strategists (who advise campaigns on what works) tend also to be involved in the firms that do this work, and direct their clients to spend money with entities in which they have a financial interest. It is an industry which is absolutely rife with the kinds of conflicts of interest that wouldn't be tolerated for long elsewhere.
And its also an industry where people very often fail upward due to connections rather than succeeding on their track record.
I’m one of those schmucks who thinks the solution to ignorance and misinformation is education, and that there should always be more options for voters, not fewer. It’s not about credit to the voters, it’s about making sure the avenues for change are always open. That’s one thing I love about California — it’s a fucking mess, we have no one to blame but ourselves, and there’s always someone trying to do something about it. Compare this to the Texas style of democracy — legislature meets only ever other year and if you don’t like something you can get out - I’ll take the California way.
You don't solve this problem by ditching direct democracy in favor of representative one, though. The end result is that people still vote for populists, who are either clueless and quickly run things into the ground, or are pandering sociopaths. The "philosopher representatives" has been shown to be as much of a sham as philosopher kings.
Just because "the majority" want it doesn't make it a good thing. That's why there is a Constitution (in the USA) and courts to protect various minority from the over-reaching majority. If I make a few bucks on the side working for uber in the evenings does that mean they should give me an insurance policy and retirement plan?
How do you think it should have played out? Laws were passed, special interests didn't like it and now there's a court battle. And immediately you say nothing can get passed that special interests oppose.
California has the curve ball of the proposition system. Its not that hard to make it to the ballot with anything. It can be a little silly but it is what it is.
How is this a term limits issue? What would you like to have seen?
>California has the curve ball of the proposition system.
That is where special interest is most heavily felt. This court ruling is mostly meaningless. There is a proposition on the ballot that directly addresses this employment/independent contractor issue. It would supersede the legislature and make it nearly impossible for the legislature to repeal or amend the law. The prop also happens to have the most expensive campaign in history behind it. Something like 90-95% of the money came in on the Yes side and it is almost exclusively coming from Uber, Lyft, and similar companies.
Basically these companies didn't get what they wanted in the legislature. They didn't get what they wanted in court. So they are trying to buy it from the public. They are hoping we aren't motivated enough to educate ourselves on the issue and will instead just vote Yes because all the campaigning is telling us to do so.
On the other hand, California also created a bill that targets two companies specifically; kind of its own special interest if you will. We saw how quickly they started carving out exceptions once the original bill was passed and comedians couldn’t perform, and journalists started getting let go. Why not just pass the bill and call it the “Uber and Lyft must pay their drivers like employees and let them act like independent contractors too” bill? Because that’s really what it is.
Uber and Lyft will no doubt relocate and cease operations in California altogether if they can’t get around this. I guess the pandemic is a good time to do that since so many workers are remote, but there is no doubt in my mind that’s going to happen. The bill that was passed is an existential crises for them. The business model was intended for people to make some part time money. Like selling stuff on Etsy. It cant support paying drivers like they are salaried workers. Not many of them at least. It’s all around bad.
When states and the feds start regulating companies like this, it’s a prime example of the failures of our governments to provide for the people.
Yet many drivers do this full time. Why should ride share companies be excluded from worker protections that apply to other companies?
Could Amazon convert to a gig-economy for warehouse workers where you sign up via an app?
There are certainly some folks who drive just a few hours a week and the companies like to highlight that by releasing stats like “% of drivers drive less then 5 hours”. I think “% of driver time by drivers over 35h/week” would paint a different picture and show just how much they rely on full time drivers.
Many people sell stuff on eBay as their full time job too. I don't find this line of reasoning compelling if you want to single out Uber and Lyft specifically. What is the amount of hours they should work to not be "employees"? 5? Ok Uber and Lyft can limit the hours you drive to 5. Is that fine then?
I'd actually say though that what you identified (gig worker for Amazon warehouses) might be desirable if we had many "benefits" divorced from your employer, like the 401k, health care, etc. What if I could work my salaried job, and then sign up to go work a shift at the warehouse?
It's not just benefits that employees receive, it's also taxes paid on employees. Moving benefits out of employment is a good idea, but if that happened, the taxes to fund these services would come from employers again. So Uber would still be more or less leeching off of society by not paying its share of social funds
Secondly, the discussion of hours, while potentially having some philosophical merit, isn't especially material in the scheme of things. Uber can't survive with everyone driving fewer than x hours. A lot of their comp structure tries to incentive people to drive as much as possible, with nonlinear increasing rewards for those who drive the most. Their business is built on network effects. If there's fewer drivers, then it costs more, so fewer people ride, so fewer people want to drive, and the more expensive it is the keep the driver population thriving. The idea behind surge pricing is that you create flash incentives to get drivers out there when demand is high. If there's a cap on hours, you've now got a competing interest which says there's an incentive to NOT work while the market isn't surging- because you might cost yourself greater earnings down the line.
It's a lot easier to get a driver doing 5 hours to do 8 hours instead, than it is to get two drivers to do 4 hours. Labor has switching costs for the drivers.
Ok so then Uber would just be paying taxes from the sale of the rides. I'm kind of confused as to why that would be an issue. But happy to hear more about it.
> If there's a cap on hours, you've now got a competing interest which says there's an incentive to NOT work while the market isn't surging- because you might cost yourself greater earnings down the line.
Ok so then is the cap 8 hours? 10? Is it 7? It seems to me that you're inventing more problems to solve a different problem than is worthwhile. You can have more drivers doing less hours, if the economics of it work (and neither of us know whether or not it does, and ironically enough I doubt the State of California does either). The point isn't to move goal posts around a set number of hours, the point is to illustrate that is exactly what you're advocating for.
> Ok so then Uber would just be paying taxes from the sale of the rides. I'm kind of confused as to why that would be an issue. But happy to hear more about it.
Odds are good that if health insurance benefits are pushed out of employers, you're going to see it funded by a tax on top of wages, not a corporate income tax, because the former is directly tied to the number of people the org is supporting in the United States and the latter is not. The classification of employee vs. contractor is still salient. It's still a good idea nonetheless.
> Ok so then is the cap 8 hours? 10? Is it 7? It seems to me that you're inventing more problems to solve a different problem than is worthwhile. You can have more drivers doing less hours, if the economics of it work (and neither of us know whether or not it does, and ironically enough I doubt the State of California does either).
I don't think there's any philosophical merit to claiming someone working 7+ hours a day is not a full time worker. We may not know the exact economics, but we do know they're not great. Uber loses billions per year, and pays substantial money to deal with high driver turnover. A mixed system makes it worse.
> Odds are good that if health insurance benefits are pushed out of employers, you're going to see it funded by a tax on top of wages, not a corporate income tax...
Sure, but there are ways to fix that. I'm not really a big fan of corporate taxes just because they seem to always either find a way around it, or they just raise prices. It's hard to escape.
> I don't think there's any philosophical merit to claiming someone working 7+ hours a day is not a full time worker. We may not know the exact economics, but we do know they're not great. Uber loses billions per year, and pays substantial money to deal with high driver turnover. A mixed system makes it worse.
I think the issue here is the definition of full-time work is not enough. It has to include other things, like having to physically go to a place of employment, work hours that you're told to work, etc. Should AirBnB have to employee hosts? Why is it different? You can't make the hours argument, because there are plenty of Uber drivers that don't drive "full time" and plenty of AirBnB hosts that run AirBnB full time. It also messes with any other sort of gig work, hence why the state had to go back and carve out all these exceptions - which is in my opinion usually an indicator of a bad or poorly thought out law.
Here's the actual issue. These gig workers, or contractors, or whatever you want to call them need benefits (healthcare etc.) that the government isn't paying for. The government needs to pay for that by raising taxes and/or lowering costs, etc. The way to do that isn't to make Uber and Lyft leave California and leave those workers without any sort of income. Even if it was right to do so morally (and I doubt that it is), it's wrong to do so practically. To me as I've stated previously, this looks like a government failure, not a failure of Uber and Lyft.
> The classification of employee vs. contractor is still salient.
This entirely depends on how the tax is written. Independent contractors already pay "more" for social security to cover the taxes that the employer would normally pay. I suspect that the law would be written such that the total healthcare tax placed on an individual is the same regardless of if they are W4 or 1099.
> Sure, but there are ways to fix that. I'm not really a big fan of corporate taxes just because they seem to always either find a way around it, or they just raise prices. It's hard to escape.
There's no way around payroll taxes for employees. The ones they elude are corporate income taxes. If they have to raise prices to cover the cost of insuring drivers, or paying their share of social funds, then good. Because if they don't, its the public that bears the costs.
> I think the issue here is the definition of full-time work is not enough. It has to include other things, like having to physically go to a place of employment, work hours that you're told to work, etc.
There is more to it. What you're arguing for is an escape rule if hours are too low, that supercedes all of the other logic.
> Here's the actual issue. These gig workers, or contractors, or whatever you want to call them need benefits (healthcare etc.) that the government isn't paying for.
No, the government (the public) is paying for it, because Uber and Lyft aren't.
> The government needs to pay for that by raising taxes and/or lowering costs, etc. The way to do that isn't to make Uber and Lyft leave California and leave those workers without any sort of income.
The government needs to do that by raising taxes on Uber and Lyft, which is largely the point of making these people of employees. Is there a middle of the road version where uber just pays the proportion costs that drivers earn pro rated to the hours they work? Yeah, maybe, but that's likely not viable either. Uber is already in the red because their business model is bad.
If we imagined them paying their fair share, would you support an explicit subsidy to help keep them in business in CA? God I hope not.
And i think it's OK. There is a reason why professional truck drivers must not drive longer than specified amount of time without taking breaks. Work safety regulations are usually written in blood.
But the work is fundamentally different. You can work 80 hours in retail for example. With Uber drivers it's not "drive down long stretch of road without a break for 8 hours".
Uber drivers are, well, drivers. I wouldn't trust somebody working 80-hour schedule (with everything that implies about their quality of rest, or lack thereof) to be regularly driving a car in public. That's just accidents waiting to happen.
No one should be doing 80 hours a week, that's 12 hours each day without weekends + commute (1 hour) + 8 hours sleep, 2 hours for eating and you have 1 hour left for the "all the other things". And thats if you don't have children. If you do you already spending more than 24 hours a day.
They will be able to if Uber wants to offer unlimited overtime to their new employees. So it's up to the boss to forbid it, not employee classification.
> On the other hand, California also created a bill that targets two companies specifically; kind of its own special interest if you will.
And it's not like California just decided to target those two companies for fun. Labor unions lobbied Lorena Gonzalez to get AB5 passed so that they could have more dues paying members. So there's a clear special interest responsible for AB5.
> On the other hand, California also created a bill that targets two companies specifically
No, it didn't.
AB5 codified a court decision with much broader impact than to those two companies, and in doing so exempted a few other impacted industries from it, leaving more than those two companies, and more than the industry they are in, still affected (whether you count the bill and the court case together, such that the impact is those not exempted, or separately, so that it is those exempted.)
Yeah my only issue with how this played out is that the proposition on the ballot written by Uber/Lyft gives ride-share companies a specific exemption, rather than just repeal AB5 for everybody. I would be a lot more forgiving towards they're lobbying effort if it was focused on fixing a bad law rather than just helping themselves only.
It's designed so when the law makers give up on AB5 they have to admit it was the wrong move rather than letting the ballot proposition let them escape blame.
At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical leftist, I'm struggling to see how more of the blame can be on term limits, and not just a side-effect of our current version of democracy under capitalism.
Simply put, if I had 100B, and there was outside force threatening my business I would certainly invest to protect myself - this includes mundane things like investing in security and outside threats like regulation. I just don't know you would design a government that is protected against an outside player pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in order to change the laws. If anything I think an official who decided to get in bed with special interest groups is far more prepared to outspend any opponent, and is the safer option for special interests groups.
I think, in the future, we will see more Facebook era startups get smarter and smarter on playing politics. Airbnb originally failed miserably in their political game, but I think as time goes on SV will only get better at influencing California & global politics.
I've been looking for my copy of the LA Times article on this and have yet to find it. So allow me to recount from my not necessarily trusty memory.
During an investigation of the impact of term limits on the California the times talked with former "long term" members of both the Assembly and the Senate. In that discussion the people who had served for longer terms felt that you needed the time to understand what made a law "good" versus what made a law "bad." Examples of good and bad were things like it would not be found to be unconstitutional, or its interpretation would be clear to judges who were ruling on it. Things like that. Bad laws are ones that are ambiguous to the point of being unenforceable or are overturned at the first challenge. There was also some discussion of "wisdom" in terms of knowing what things would benefit most from change vs changing things that are easier but less durable.
They found that the time clock on legislators terms made them more eager for "easy wins" rather than tacking complex problems. This was especially true of legislators who were hoping to jump into national politics. So while a legislator had the freedom to introduce a bill to solve a tough problem many times over a long career, each time taking into account the feedback from others over how it was crafted, term limited legislators felt they could not "waste time" on something that they would not be able to see through in the amount of time remaining to them.
And while legislators have always had staffs that would help in the development and drafting of legislation, in terms of likely being able to get the legislation over the finish line, laws that came from special interests with the promise of providing "good press" to support it are seen as a better bet.
By the same token, I am not a California Legislator, nor have I been one (although I have considered putting my name in the running to develop some experiential learning there). As a result I cannot know for certain how much I read about the process is biased in a way that someone who was part of the process would easily spot.
Whether or not what I've read about the process is accurate, it is still an area that I am interested in and I find the "dual" between the legislature and initiative writers interesting in its own right.
>They found that the time clock on legislators terms made them more eager for "easy wins" rather than tacking complex problems. This was especially true of legislators who were hoping to jump into national politics.
Ah that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I did not actually consider that when you mentioned experience - a newer politician certainly has more pressure to put points on the board and it follows that they may introduce "buggy" laws.
Often this feel is based on past mistakes made. In this case a mistake would be a well intended law overturned by the courts.
Intuitively I feel like mistakes would be repeated on a longer time scale. So someone who remembers what we did 15 years ago would say “let’s not waste time on this, it hasn’t worked in the past”.
You can still learn with 10 year term limits but then you’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes every 10 years.
Anything can be a special interest group with the right framing.
Rich individuals can act just as you’ve described. Groups of workers can get together and get bills passed specifically for their special interest to the detriment of the country as a whole. Etc.
The specific issue I was pointing out is that rich individuals are far more able to quickly move the needle in acting politically, and this problem only gets worse as inequality grows. For example, in this situation drivers are also a special interest group, however, drivers are unable to spend millions in facebook ads, tv ads and lobbyists to fight for their issue.
If your political opponent can drown your message out, then it becomes an imperative for you to also raise money and/or find a wealthy benefactor to argue your own ideas. You end up with a system that the only ideas that are seriously considered are ones that can raise enough money to not be drowned out. I don't think we are there today in our current politics but I think it's worth thinking about as it's not clear to me that government will remain impervious to this type of influence.
Labor unions (and any other similar member-driven organizations) become powerful by concentrating people, not money. And more people translating to more political power is the quintessence of democracy.
> And do they wield power through any other means than capitalism?
Sure. For an obvious example, see public sector unions. For another, NASA. The public school system. In the news lately are the police interests. The military. Organized religion.
They wield considerable political power via controlling large voting blocks.
Other means historically used are military power. The end of the Roman republic is an obvious example, but the historical examples are endless. (Even in the US, George Washington was offered a military dictatorship, but turned it down.)
None of these are capitalist, and all are present in non-capitalist systems. The idea that under non-capitalism there wouldn't be powerful special interests is hopelessly untrue.
Wielding political power by virtue of being a large number of voters is literally what democracy is.
Unless you somehow think these people are somehow deluded or being manipulated or simply wrong because they do not agree with your political views, the ideal of democracy must be to have as large a part of the population as possible involved in politics and voting as possible.
> Watching this fight I wonder "Who is in charge of governing California?"
The same people vote on the proposition who vote for the government. I don't like the things California tends to vote for but it is nothing short of enlightened to allow people a mechanism to directly overrule the legislature.
If the people don't like the government's labour law, who are the government to object? I can't for the life of me see why the people can't choose how they work. It is the one thing I think they are qualified to comment on.
The mechanism for overriding a government existing is one thing, but making it so easy to trigger for the most random things left and right is quite another. I'm not sure if you've seen the CA ballots, but casting an informed vote is quite arduous for the average person, partly due to the nuances involved in the topics (experts who've spent their lives studying these topics can easily disagree on some of them), and partly due to the sheer number of things people need to vote on. You easily need to forego days' worth of income (hope you have disposable income to spare!) to do anything resembling a reasonable amount of research to cast something that can be called an informed vote.
Even ignoring the fact that many people don't have the time, energy, or means of sufficiently informing themselves to decide nuanced public policy issues, what they do cannot be overridden by the legislature (except for the few issues that specify otherwise). Which is fine for the fraction of people who want that, but for everybody else who doesn't think their opinion is the last word on an issue and understands unexpected problems might come up later, there's no way for them to vote "I'm in favor of this policy but only if the legislature can override it (say) after N years". Or to vote "I think the legislature should decide this and not my fellow citizens, because I honestly have no clue and I think the issue is just too complicated to let random people decide." Just imagine if the FDA approved drugs by popular vote...
Really, it defeats how the system is supposed to work. The entire point of electing officials you trust is so they can find experts they can trust and rely on their opinions for making informed decisions. So you don't have to spend your time deciding random things, both to save your time (don't forget it's literally your representative's job to legislate, and not yours), and because you (and me, and most people) probably don't know nearly enough about many issues. It's especially counterproductive to have to vote with people you agree and trust but to be forced to do that in a way that prevents them from being able to improve it down the road. The last thing you should want to do to someone you like and trust is to bypass them in the decision-making progress!
Ultimately, there is certainly wisdom in letting people override their government, but CA's implementation of this idea has left a lot to be desired by its own population.
> casting an informed vote is quite arduous for the average person
This argument always comes up when discussing direct democracy or similar ideas, but it completely collapses under even the most basic scrutiny!
Direct voting is strictly better than delegated voting, because you can always ... wait for it ... delegate your vote! You don’t care enough about the issue to educate yourself? Simply cast the vote for the option your government/party/favourite expert recommends! After all, you already trust them (otherwise you wouldn’t have voted for them), so by “delegating” your vote to them, is equivalent to not having the popular vote in the first place!
It's difficult to informatively delegate your vote with all the entirely false mailers and advertisements bombarding people every election. The numbers of voters who vote flippantly, or vote on false premises, have never been quantified, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were significant given the amount of times the electorate has directly voted against their own self interest (like banning subway construction in LA from the 90s to the 2010s, and paying for it now with higher construction costs three decades later).
My elderly parents and all their neighbors got blanketed with mailers that showed am elderly couple on the cover and stated prop 22 was going stop senior citizens from getting their meds delivered to them. The is pure evil and totally legal to misrepresent the issues by pulling on voter's heartstrings. My parents were duped and they will win with these slimey deceitful tactics.
Actually, that's an interesting UX idea "[ ] Let my selected representative vote for me on all unmarked propositions". Vote on the ones you have insight on, leave the rest.
> This argument always comes up when discussing direct democracy or similar ideas, but it completely collapses under even the most basic scrutiny!
> Direct voting s strictly better than delegated voting, because you can always ... wait for it ... delegate your vote! You don’t care enough about the issue to educate yourself? Simply cast the vote for the option your government/party/favourite expert recommends! After all, you already trust them (otherwise you wouldn’t have voted for them), so by “delegating” your vote to them, is equivalent to not having the popular vote in the first place!
No, it very much stands up to "the most basic scrutiny". What it does not stand up to is a premature reply to an imagined argument that lacks a full understanding of the actual argument I was making. As I explained above: you might be in favor of an idea your party has, but you might also not want to bypass the legislature and lock the entire state into that decision. And you might not want your fellow citizens to lock you into a decision on that topic either. You might want to try out an idea but let the legislature improve things in the future. Or you might want to override the legislature temporarily, but allow them to change things after a few years have passed. You do not have this kind of flexibility with the current system. Voting with your party in favor of a measure bypassing and overriding your legislature is not the same thing as letting your party make that same decision in the legislature. It is far, far more risky and it ties the legislature's hands in the future.
There are also those who think the certain issues might deserve to be handled by a bipartisan legislature after a long period of consultation with experts, and not by a hasty party-line vote (or by popular vote). Though I guess the fact that this isn't even considered a possibility is itself rather telling.
Finally, the notion that anyone who hasn't sufficiently educated themselves on each topic to feel comfortable making a decision on it somehow "does not care enough" is a really juvenile way to look at this. As I (also) explained in my comment above, these issues can be complicated, with nontrivial, non-obvious implications. Experts (people who "care enough to educate themselves" on complicated topics) easily spend their entire careers working on some of these topics. And on top of that, many citizens simply cannot afford (financially or otherwise) to spend the days/weeks/months required to fully get to the bottom of each issue. That you prefer to regard everyone who doesn't come to complete confidence on every issue as lazy/ignorant/etc. does not make them so.
P.S. Your attempt at a trivial solution ("basic scrutiny"?) itself fails to account for the fact that people from the same party you like can appear on both sides of an issue. And it's also possible for your favorite party/representative not to have even made an endorsement.
In a system like this, parties would look very different - instead of "big tents" that promote groupthink long term, you'd have multiple small, often single-issue parties. And similarly, voters would pick different parties to represent them on different issues.
Too complicated? It's basically the same as splitting the ballot, and that used to be the norm rather than exception in much of American politics.
Yea until the same problems just get applied everywhere instead of in one state only.
I prefer keeping many things at the state level. It’s much more difficult to be involved in government when you’re trying to vote in a pool of 350,000,000 people with different interests. Democracies lose effectiveness as population increases.
As I said, I prefer keeping many things at the state level, not necessarily all things. What you're describing here might be a good example of something that should be or continue to be regulated at the federal level, but keep in mind that we do have "tax dodging" scenarios to this day if you move to different states with different rules. (you can also apply this globally as well, tax havens, etc.)
Over time I've become more interested in the loose confederation of states and decentralization of power over consolidation of power at the hands of the federal government. I think the US has too large of a population with an increasing amount of differences to really effectively govern. If parents want to teach kids that the earth was created 6,000 years ago in their state, who am I to say otherwise? Vote with your feet and $$. If I don't like how California handles businesses like Uber and Lyft, same thing. At least at the state level though you right now have some reasonable measure of involvement. I can email my state representative and actually get a response. My federal one? Not a chance.
>This is why employment law needs to be take away from the states - have one federally defined set of laws - stops a race to the bottom.
It's not that hard to imagine a world where Chester Cheeto wins in a landslide, the Republicans get a healthy majority in congress and the Kochs convince them to repeal most existing federal labor law.
Will you be clamoring for federal labor and employment law then?
Sure, there might be 40-something states with lower cost of doing business than CA. But is that status quo really worse than one where the federal government both controls employment law and guts it? If CA really is doing it right then surely the people working menial jobs will be better off, have more income, spend more income and their economy will grow, the rules will be a net-positive overall and other states will adopt similar ones.
Agreed. "It should be a national issue!" presumes a particular set of policies are enacted, enacted effectively, and enacted fairly.
One could certainly be overly optimistic about that happening. Best case, it makes "a federal issue" out of something at a time when political divisiveness is already at intolerable levels. At least now Alabama and California can disappointedly shake their damn heads at one another instead of being engaged in active opposition.
> California didn't help itself when it implemented term limits which had the unpleasant side effect of never having any legislators with enough experience in the job to know how to really get things done.
I've never understood this argument. Potential "yay" and "nay" votes are both term-limited, so the "inexperience" should cancel out?
The fear of rocking the boat effects anyone that, well, will live longer. Whether you are looking for continued perks/bribes in office, a cushy lobbying job after, or simply don't want to make enemies before your political next move, the perverse incentives are still there.
Perhaps a better thing to do would be to let the populace force votes on a daily basis (with queuing / anti DOS measures, of course), so the representatives have to go on the record one way or another, and can't hide behind inaction.
> I've never understood this argument. Potential "yay" and "nay" votes are both term-limited, so the "inexperience" should cancel out?
What? Take this to it's logical conclusion and imagine term limits of 1 day. No one would be making sound decisions with those yeas and nays.
And why would they always be 50 / 50 and "cancel out"? If you know nothing about a fairly complex topic, it's easy to be mislead, especially by someone with an ulterior motive that's playing a game much longer than your term limits.
> Imagine term limits of 1 day. No one would be making sound decisions with those yeas and nays.
I have no idea what terms limits of 1 day would do; it's not obvious to me. Please argue your point.
> And why would they always be 50 / 50 and "cancel out"?
I'm not talking about a vote split additive cancel out. I'm talking about how in `(termLimit * nFor) / (termLimit * nAgainst)` the `termLimit` factors cancel out.
> If you know nothing about a fairly complex topic, it's easy to be mislead, especially by someone with an ulterior motive that's playing a game much longer than your term limits.
Again you seem to be imagining legislators are dead at the end of the term and born at the beginning or something. They have plenty time to study the role before (c.f. the stereotypical centrist-psychopath politician planning from elementary school), and plenty of their career to be judged on their actions after.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of factors that reinforce the status quo, but I still haven't heard a decent argument term limits aren't obviously among them one way or the other.
>I have no idea what terms limits of 1 day would do; it's not obvious to me. Please argue your point.
Not the GP, but I think the point is fairly simple to express. If you took office tomorrow, and had a term of one day, and there was a vote on a legislative item, how much could you possibly learn about the issue in the time prior to that vote? Short term limits mean that it's harder for legislators to really understand the more complex issues since by the time they do, if they ever do, they are likely to be forced out by the term limit. Additionally, they probably won't be effective at getting any legislation passed until they understand how to work with the system.
Another way to look at it, is how long would it take you to become effective if you switched careers tomorrow? What if you had a maximum time you could spend in that career? How long would you spend being less effective because you are still learning how to do the job? How long would you have to work at a professional or expert level?
If we assume legislators only need a few weeks or months to get up to speed, then term limits of 6-8 years don't matter. If we assume it takes a few years to become effective, then we're hobbling our legislators for close to half the maximum time they can be on office. It's slightly ameliorated by the fact they can seek another office in a different branch, but that doesn't eliminate the problem, they're still going to have to learn a lot (assuming what you learn as a legislator is what interest groups are important at that level, who of your fellow legislators are good at what, etc). Though the fact that everyone is in the same boat and there can't be some institutionalized personnel that are very good at certain things for others to rely on makes it worse.
Having no term limits has problems too, but the short term limits in CA and it's affect on institutionalized legislative knowledge and capability has been talked about for decades at this point.
> how much could you possibly learn about the issue in the time prior to that vote?
Again, the votes might be new, but the issues are not. There's plenty to learn about them before getting the job
> Additionally, they probably won't be effective at getting any legislation passed until they understand how to work with the system.
Again, "the system" hinges on authority of the other lawmakers. Lobbies and other non-democratic operators obviously exert a lot of power, but that takes the form of playing sides against each other. Term limits makes all of the legislator factinos played against each other weaker.
> Another way to look at it, is how long would it take you to become effective if you switched careers tomorrow?
I don't think being a politician is unskilled labor! But the skill lies in campaigning and bargaining, not voting. Unlike politician on politician vote struggles, politician on public campaigning doesn't out. Maybe this results in voter apathy and therefore blander/weaker bills but this is a complex second order effect.
I'm not even trying to defend term limits to you all here, just arguing that these arguments against them are as simplistic as the older arguments for them.
> If we assume legislators only need a few weeks or months to get up to speed, then term limits of 6-8 years don't matter. If we assume it takes a few years to become effective, then we're hobbling our legislators for close to half the maximum time they can be on office.
I'm perfectly willing to say they get more powerful and more skilled over the years. So the big first order effect of term limits is not on the absolute power of the legislature, but the relative power of new vs old politicians.
Not the person you are replying to, but I think the point they are trying to make is that the less experience a politician has, the more likely they are to believe what they are told by someone with an agenda who is trying to influence them, e.g. special interests. So the lack of experience doesn't cancel out for yea and nay when it comes to any given vote, because special interests will be lobbying mostly for one of the two, and thus the lack of experience (i.e. resistance to influence by having your own knowledge of the area) can tip the balance.
HN is full of dilettantes that are skeptical of every article they read here. Why would freshman politicians commit the faux pas of being gullible --- we can even ignore the actual veracity of wait they are told --- when they can be cynical skeptics too?
> Again you seem to be imagining legislators are dead at the end of the term and born at the beginning or something.
Term limits have the effect of putting the experienced legislators in the employ of special interests - because that is the only way 'up'. The time in office becomes a portfolio for said special interest jobs, turning legislators "against the [poor] people".
Yay & Nay votes aren't the only job of legislators. They're often responsible for writing good legislation too -- something that's arguably difficult to do if you're new to the job, so the task (largely) falls back to special interests to "help" with the process.
By way of example: Literature. It's easy to read a good book; it's much harder to write one without lots & lots of practice.
Many legislators come to the job with previous experience serving at the county or city level. Once they have are elected at the state level they can serve for up to 12 years. To me, that seems like a reasonable balance between giving them enough time to gain experience while not allowing them to stay in office forever and amass the power and corruption that led to the passage of term limits (proposition 140) in the first place.
The academic literature is overwhelming support of the argument that legislative term limits have zero value. They only lead to inexperienced, ineffective legislators.
I actually think the argument about committee chairing is a bit more credible than what's been said in this thread. Stability definitely can help nurture depth more than a parade of different positions.
Even when the outside interests don't write the legislation, it's the staff and not actually politicians that too: politicians are basically constantly in meetings / at events and have no time for such work. :|
Nothing prevents the staff from being retained from when legislator to the next.
> Even when the outside interests don't write the legislation, it's the staff and not actually politicians that too: politicians are basically constantly in meetings / at events and have no time for such work.
That's a little bit true but mostly misleading. As with any office with professional staff, most of the work of a legislative office is done by the staff, not the head of the office, true. OTOH, that doesn't mean the the skill, knowledge, and understanding of the head of the office is irrelevant, as the head directs the staff strategically, reviews, inquires, refines, and redirects work, etc.
> Nothing prevents the staff from being retained from when legislator to the next.
The new legislators not having the skill to select appropriate staff might, but a bigger problem isn't that the staff aren't retained but that they usually are; the less skilled the legislators are, the more the professional staff (who probably are shuttling back and forth between working for legislators and working for interest groups) do not only the detail work, but also control the agenda, and the less which faces the electorate sends to fill the nominally most important seats actually matter.
That's a better argument, but also note that's it's a preventable mistake of legislatures not to rehire and therefore force the conflict of interest revolving door issue.
Also note that this sort of negligence is happening today despite a lack of fedral congressional term limits: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/05/24/vital-stats... . I can't find a source but I believe there is a similar issue with the per-congressperson researcher appropriations.
So while perhaps less turnover helps make for stabler staffing jobs, it's not a cure-all. Ultimately the balance between Expertise and Democracy is a difficult one that we need to do a better job at (usually having not enough of both!) with or without term limits.
And that's partly how you end up with what many people would perceive as a "shadow government" -- obviously a group of people are writing the laws, and most likely they're experienced in doing so, but who _are_ they? And who are they accountable to?
Kind of like the bureaucratic equivalent of external consultants coming into a private company.
> I've never understood this argument. Potential "yay" and "nay" votes are both term-limited, so the "inexperience" should cancel out?
Your analysis seems to think that legislation is just pushing "yay" or "nay" buttons, and that discussion of experience simply is about people having the skill to find the correct button. (Though inexperience there wouldn't cancel out, either, even with a 50/50 split in intended votes, it would lead to reduced predictability.)
Legislators do more than push "yay" and "nay" buttons on packages that are assembled completely outside of their control, though.
I do think they do plenty more than "yay" or "nay", but the lack of courage among our legislatures is evidenced in both the California legislature and Congress, so I'm less inclined to think term limits is the relevant issue
In California I think the huge dominance of the landowning class is more pertinent.
Really, I want a non-FPTP parliamentary system. Politics should officially be a "team sport" as it is in practice, and should be a battle of ideologies not personalities. Coincidentally, these means (to me at least) that not having term limits is way less of potential problem, and so I would be against having them.
Inexperience should "cancel out"? This mental model of how legislature is developed and then passed is probably the silliest I've ever heard. You should be more discerning of your thought processes.
> I've never understood this argument. Potential "yay" and "nay" votes are both term-limited, so the "inexperience" should cancel out?
There are no term limits on C-level executives in deep-pocketed corporations and special interests. The term limits are on the legislators they buy. It's like a subscription model: you need to renew every few years to keep the gravy flowing.
This is the argument for term limits, BTW: Incumbuants are terrified of their next campaign (which is a every 2 years threat for representatives in the House, btw.) whereas more term limits means more brazen lame ducks.
Then again, lame ducks need a job afterword so it's a bad augment too.
My conclusions is that term limits seam mostly for show, with muddle benefits and disadvantages. Perhaps the real policy move is term limits + enough UBI that the lame ducks are truly safe no matter what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition is a neat idea which is like term limits but on steroids: you're as suddenly on the job as you are suddenly off it. I think this example, with the heightened stakes / wider Overton window, makes for the more interesting debate.
That would be an accurate analysis if this was, for example, random noise in a system. But inexperience is not random, and cannot be said to "cancel out" in any meaningful way.
Legislatures and Governors are merely instruments and people should be in charge. Having lived in many countries I would rather live in a country where Uber and Lift can add something to ballot rather than where they secretly bribe Governor or Legislators.
Both Uber and Lyft are California companies with billions of dollars in investment and thousands of employees, if they are facing an existential crisis I would at least give them a fair chance. California's hare brained policy to push some virtue signaling measure down the throats of Uber and Lyft is not good for gig economy, riders and innovations. Self driving cars would put all this theater to rest for good hopefully.
I think a relevant question is whether California should be legislating these things at all.
Look for example at prop 23 (a doctor must be present for dialysis). There's a clear interest group here (dialysis clinics are in existential crisis) but if you look at a bigger picture, you may see why it might not be economically feasible for clinics in less densely populated areas to hire full time doctors, considering the associated costs and even just the general supply of doctors.
In that light, does it make sense to try to pass blanket regulation that can have wildly different outcomes depending on hyperlocal factors such as population density? I recently watched a debate between a couple of right leaning folks and they talked about how the left tends to lean towards trying to generalize universally, and this seems like a pathological example where such an approach might not make sense, compared to hyperlocal municipality-driven regulation, or even no regulation at all.
But rideshare employment regulation is not a California issue, it's a _global_ issue. California wasn't first to GDPR, yet it's the home of internet advertising. Sales tax laws for online commerce had to come from the Supreme Court.
Uber got away with greyballing and other price espionage in New York and outright medical record theft in India. Have those legislatures been successful against Uber?
Nope, the federal level has no term limits. Dianne Feinstein has been a Senator for 30 years.
Even without term limits, laws are written by industry at the federal level (if they are ever written, some years we are just lucky to pass a budget at the federal level).
It's a very small minority that thinks drivers are properly classified as employees. The drivers themselves certainly do not think so. Drivers literally do not have to work.
California's problem is precisely that it is a one party state. Even a few decades ago, California was not the one party state it is today. Having multiple candidates with meaningful differences on the ballot automatically lowers the ability of special interests to rule the state because it is difficult to be supported by people on completely different sides of the aisle.
The proposition that made California the way it is is the one that meant that the primaries are non-partisan and the final race is between the two top contenders. This means that special interests in California need only present their cause through the lens of leftism and they will automatically find sympathetic candidates in the top two, no matter who those are. Contrast this with a partisan primary system. In that system, on the final ballot, it would be difficult for special interests to formulate an argument appealing to both candidates.
EDIT: for some reason, I am downvoted but there is little engagement or actual refutation of what I'm saying. If you're going to downvote, at least say something. Otherwise, it makes it seem like the one-party state's propaganda arm is awake and working.
> The proposition that made California the way it is is the one that meant that the primaries are non-partisan and the final race is between the two top contenders.
No, it's not.
It's not even a proposition. It's that the California Republican Party tries to campaign like it's Kansas, that keeps them hovering right at the border of the level where Democrats have a 2/3 supermajority in both houses plus control of the statewide offices.
> This means that special interests in California need only present their cause through the lens of leftism and they will automatically find sympathetic candidates in the top two,
It's actually pretty rare that the jungle primary provides same party candidates (and it's never, IIRC, done “Democrat plus leftist third party”), so, no, that wouldn't be true even if the California Democratic Party was reliably leftist, which it decidedly is not, see, e.g., Dianne Feinstein.
> Contrast this with a partisan primary system. In that system, on the final ballot, it would be difficult for special interests to formulate an argument appealing to both candidates.
It's actually not, you just craft it around the local district not left-right ideology.
> for some reason, I am downvoted but there is little engagement or actual refutation of what I'm saying. If you're going to downvote, at least say something.
Downvoting is saying that something isn't a productive addition to the conversation, engaging is saying that even if it is wrong, it is. There's really no good reason to engage when downvoting, or vice versa, they serve opposing purposes.
You have basically said that the republicans are simply bad in the state because they “campaign like it’s Kansas,” which is ridiculous because candidates are always local. That type of dismissiveness of an entire party is exactly the issue.
> You have basically said that the republicans are simply bad in the state because they “campaign like it’s Kansas,” which is ridiculous because candidates are always local.
The state party officials (and party aligned interest groups) have a big impact on candidate grooming, funding, selection, and messaging, and the influence they exert results in campaigns that are ineffective in much of the state. And it wasn't always that way, and it didn't because of the jungle primary change (Schwarzenegger was an exception to it, but not because he was before the jungle primary, but because he came through a route entirely outside of the party system, despite being a party member; the effect had already set in, though it wasn't yet as deep as it is now.)
> That type of dismissiveness of an entire party is exactly the issue.
You are making this out to be a political argument which it is not. The point is when all levels of government align under one party, which has leaders, it becomes more like a dictatorship. I don’t care how bad you personally consider the Republican party, there are those who consider Democrats the same way. That polar mindset is the problem. It’s not as black and white as you make it out to be and many people often agree with various positions on both sides, but when one side becomes to strong you are forced to essentially agree with all positions of that dominant side.
> You are making this out to be a political argument which it is not.
No, I'm not. I'm making it out to be a factual argument about the causes of the present political situation, which it very much is.
You seem to be unable to separate evaluation of the factual causes and effects of political situation with moral evaluation of the involved actors.
> The point is when all levels of government align under one party, which has leaders, it becomes more like a dictatorship.
Not really, especially with the jungle primary system which limits the ability of party leaders to control candidate selection in districts where the other major party fails to maintain competitiveness, and especially not where the people retain the powers of initiative, referendum, and recall, and entities outside the dominant party (including, but not limited to, the second place party) are able to bring issues directly to the people through those avenues against the desires of the dominant party.
> I don’t care how bad you personally consider the Republican party, there are those who consider Democrats the same way
I have said a word (in this thread) about how bad I consider the Republican Party, only how poorly chosen their recent electoral strategy has been for the realities of the State. There's other states (and, though to a far lesser extent, other times in not-too-distant California history) where I would say the same broad kind of things (with different details about the problem) about the Democrats.
> but when one side becomes to strong you are forced to essentially agree with all positions of that dominant side.
Maybe, in some abstract sense, but not on any concrete sense that actually has any bearing on the actual situation in California.
The way you are trying to dissect bits and pieces of this and not the point itself is proof enough of your bias here. You are literally splitting sentences in half and debating them separately. Really, you are even trying to debate an undisputed point of “bad” and go on to explain how wrong that is and that it is republicans “poorly chosen..etc.” Again that partisan politics has nothing to do with the point. What are are arguing is already obvious because republicans are losing and thus yes obviously they had a bad strategy. If a football team lost a game literally everyone could say they had a bad strategy or the other team has a good. The problem and point of what we are saying is what RESULTS from that occurring not a discussion on how it occurred.
> The problem and point of what we are saying is what RESULTS from that occurring not a discussion on how it occurred.
Explanations of both the cause and the results have been offered, and I have given arguments on both of those points, which you have responded to with irrelevancies as to arguments you imagine I might want to make about how good or bad the Republicans are (and then, bizarrely, having raised that imaginary argument, complained that I reacted to it and described it as misplaced and said it was an "undisputed point" that I was "trying to debate", when literally the reverse was true: it was a point I never made that you were trying to debate.)
This is ridiculous. California's gop is broadly successful as most of the states land is republican by far. And at the state level that's what matters. Plus it's only a few years ago that california had a gop governor. You can say lots of schwarzenegger but he didn't campaign like it's Kansas.
> This means that special interests in California need only present their cause through the lens of leftism and they will automatically find sympathetic candidates in the top two, no matter who those are.
The fact that no sane Republican candidates seem to exist in California is not the fault of the jungle primaries.
The lack of sane California Republicans is the fault of a Republican primary electorate that views things like "Actually running the government" as a mortal sin.
Lets see some California Republicans replace Nunes with a Republican with a couple brain cells to rub together and then we can talk about the faults in the jungle primary system.
Until then, you may want to start looking for faults by looking in the mirror.
Don’t you have ranked or proportional voting? Even with ranked voting people could choose from different democrat legislators (a Sanders vs a Biden) but be confident republican won’t get in with a plurality.
But that's what I'm saying.. when the candidates are so similar that certain interest groups always get their way (for example biden and sanders agree on oil, unlike republicans and sanders), then certain special interests become privileged
As a retired programmer who drives Lyft/Uber, it's always interesting to hear my liberal programmer friends take the side of the "working class" drivers against the Big Brother-ish Big Tech companies. I might have been one of them in the past. I'll probably be one of them in the future when self-driving cars replace drivers. But for now...
Most of the drivers who don't make enough money are bad at their job. California unions are encouraging these bad drivers to seek protection. I base this on talking to other drivers and taking rides myself. How is a driver bad at their job?
* won't do rides out of town because "I don't get paid coming back"
* won't do rides to the airport
* declines short rides
* won't get out of the car to help people put things or groceries in the trunk
* has a "my car, my rules" attitude. Won't allow drinks for example
* won't turn the radio down when someone gets a call
* male drivers bothering women who just want to get somewhere
* misses turns frequently
* talks whether the passenger wants it or not
* won't talk if passenger clearly wants to talk
* takes eyes off the road while talking
* fiddles with their cell phone while driving to look at texts
* goes too fast, tailgates, lousy driver
* talks politics, religion or sex
* has a body odor problem. doesn't use air freshener in car or shower before driving.
* has a dirty car
* won't take a different route if asked, or alternately, goes off route without explanation
* won't wait the require 5 minutes to pick someone up
* accepts a ride and then calls to see where they are going. cancels if they don't like it (Lyft)
* won't put on air conditioner when asked
I could go on, but these drivers don't get tips and don't make enough money from rides because they are not maximizing potential. Up to 70% of drivers are like me and do a good job, like the freedom to work when and where they want, and would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California.
100% counter to what virtually every Lyft driver who drives full-time has told me.
Data-wise:
Where is your evidence? I thought that by now, the free market would have solved all of the above problems?
Philosophically:
No one's job should be dependent on tips. Tips ALWAYS are filtered via biases that tap into sexism, racism, xenophobia, and never a financially responsible way of building an economy.
Vote no Prop 22, otherwise you are bailing out failed companies that work on unreliable business models.
How do so many programmers commenting online, who can easily make $150k+ if not $350k+ a year, feel so qualified to weigh in on what’s right and wrong for low skilled, low wage workers, when it goes specifically against these people’s own wishes?
Is it a matter of guilt? You feel guilty for having a decent paying job when not everybody does, and this seems like a silver bullet to fix everything?
A majority of drivers support prop 22, I don’t understand how more people don’t weigh that into their decision making. To you, you want to stick it to the greedy bastards at Uber by forcing this law through, and if it runs them out of business all the better. Have you considered there are millions of drivers that would actually like to keep their ability to work, and this is not just a big virtue signaling exercise to them like it is to you?
It's similar to a lot of the people voting yes on 23: they want to stick it to the dialysis companies. I get that, but how is the prime consideration here not patient care? Drives me crazy how people will gleefully ignore the potential patient effect in favor of "punishing" corporations.
> Vote no Prop 22, otherwise you are bailing out failed companies that work on unreliable business models.
I love this. You're conflating a business model that doesn't work under a set of (possibly) onerous regulations to a failed business model. Who has it failed for? And don't say investors, because these are smart people who believe there is a path to profitability.
Uber hasn't made any profit yet. They are a worldwide operating player for years now and didn't have single profitable quarter. Do you call this sustainable? VC money and not paying benefits for their drivers is the only thing keeping it alive.
I wasn't making a specific claim, so didn't find the need to present data, you know, for the claim I'm not making.
> I love this. You're conflating a business model that doesn't work under a set of (possibly) onerous regulations to a failed business model. Who has it failed for? And don't say investors, because these are smart people who believe there is a path to profitability.
It's a failed business model because it cannot operate once these companies are asked to pay living wages - which they don't. Hence...failed. If I were to open up a factory and paid my workers $0.50/hour and then got shut down for not paying minimum wage; the burden of that failure would be on me, not the state that's asking me to pay minimum wage.
Are you aware that the majority of drivers don't drive full time? If full time drivers don't like it or don't make enough they should apply for employment at a company that meets their needs. A lot of service workers depend on tips.
The service industry underpaying their workers shouldn't be an excuse for expanding the practice. The tip economy should be rolled back, not allowed to spread.
But service workers are also usually employees and have disability and unemployment insurance. They also often pick their shift times. You can have flexibility without being a contractor.
Bartenders, and waiters heavily dependent on tips. As non American visiting it is always taxing for me to figure what to tip.
I am more accustomed to price including the waiters salary and rarely only tipping when service is truly exceptional.
This is also the reason I and many others prefer ride shares, price is transparent and upfront, in traditional taxies the negotiations depends on your local knowledge, knowledge of drivers' language etc and your people skills and it takes effort.
A standard practice in many many places to take the unfamiliar passenger for a ride, taking the longer route, or going in circles just to run up the meter.
While with gps and smartphones going in circles has come down, taking a different route, or other more subtle meter running happens still.
It can be a lot worse with straight up cheating too. I have seen souped up meters which are not directly connected to odometers etc.
I have also seen places where if you don't know the language and/or localite they will demand more than the meter and create a scene get nearby friends to support them.
When running late to airport or someplace urgent pretending no change to charge more .
The list of tricks go on, ridesharing did away with a lot of that.
P.S. it is not all taxi drivers are evil or something, plenty of them have been really helpful in tough spots even the ones who ripped me off have come back to return a valuable item I missed.
The current incentive structure between drivers, riders, and Uber is really good.
The ability to scale up and down quickly based on demand, surge pricing, incentive to give more rides to make more, not wait around etc.
This legislation seems like it’ll make things worse for most people, except people interested in doing the minimum number of fares possible to not get fired (and the teamsters pushing the legislation for their own power).
Rides will be more expensive, harder to get, current issues with drivers not showing up or canceling will likely be worse.
Good drivers that work part time end up screwed. Taxis sucked - I’d rather not go back to that because of some grudge against tech companies held by people that don’t know what they’re talking about.
As employees, drivers would still get their $15/hour even if they're idle.
Right now,uber doesn't really care about minimizing a drivers idle time,but they'd need to otherwise. Prop 22 would still pay drivers a floor of 120% * minimum wage while they're actually driving in exchange for unpaid idle time,that 20% is a lower bound for how much they'll need to reduce the pool of drivers.
As a response, Uber/Lyft will need to either start assigning shifts or add a limit to the # of drivers that can be clocked in. I know they punish drivers that skip a ton of consecutive passengers, but they'll need to take into account the fact that a driver at 3am probably only needs to skip one or two passengers to get paid for the full hour.
Yeah, it’s hard to predict the outcome/knock-on effects without knowing more specifics so it’s definitely possible I’m wrong about that bit.
I generally think it’s a bad idea though. I’d like to think I could be persuaded otherwise, but the arguments I heard in favor of AB5 or no on 22 didn’t seem that strong.
The sense I got from friends voting no was it was mostly driven by anti-Uber motivated reasoning without much thought about existing incentives and unexpected negative consequences.
The sense I took away from reading about AB5 was that it’s a push to get drivers marked as employees so the teamsters could unionize them and collect fees.
Basically a political battle behind the scenes is the real fight and this other stuff is just confusing the issue.
In that context Yes on 22 seemed like a good option.
It's essentially a proposition to repeal a law passed by the legislature. Obviously the legislature doesn't like it, or the original law wouldn't have passed. If it wasn't essentially unmodifiable then the legislature would just annul it via amendment. There didn't need to be a measure allowing to be amended by the legislature at all, the 7/8th requirement is just in there to allow the legislature to do non-contentious fixup changes.
Often propositions require a new proposition to change, so 7/8ths is actually more permissive than normal.
That said, I think the proposition system is often problematic and I typically default to no. Though this time 22 and a few others seemed important enough for yes.
"Up to 70% of drivers are like me and do a good job, like the freedom to work when and where they want, and would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California."
No, I just really love be bopping around California doing ride share now that I am retired from computer programming. Napa Valley wine country is fun. I take breaks and go swimming in the Russian river when I'm not taking people up the river to float down. California meddling politicians and unions want to ruin it for me.
I went through my comment history and there's nothing I want to hide so I'd be happy to identify myself, not to argue, but to share my experience. I am not doing rideshare right now because I'm 63 and Covid is surging, but I may do it again once there is a vaccine. I highly recommend it to any out of work programmers in Silicon Valley. I've had several chances to network if I was looking for a job.
Maybe if they were paid enough, and/or had to vie for a limited supply of drivers, they'd turn on AC, clean their car, do short rides, etc.
People forget that when Uber was charging a fair price, the rides and drivers were nice. The race to the bottom has squeezed a lot of the good drivers out of the normal tier, and now you get busted vehicles with dirty interiors, and drivers not suited for driving OR hospitality.
You are correct. It relies on replacing the drivers they are exploiting with robots that don't require a living wage. This is absolutely that discussion, like it or not.
On that front, after I retired, I applied at Waymo as a safety driver but didn't get hired because some idiot almost hit me during the test drive while blasting his way onto the hwy 101 while merging. I did learn some interesting things though. I'd been watching Waymo cars in Mountain View for awhile. They were hiring new drivers because they needed a second driver to keep the first one awake! Apparently having the driver on camera all the time was not enough. Let's just say I'm highly skeptical that the recent opening of Waymo to the public in Arizona is not some Potemkin Village operation.
With all due respect, my experience has been the complete opposite of yours. Do you by chance have any evidence for these claims or are they simply your best guess asserted as fact?
Ok tell us about your experience and add to the conversation. These passive aggressive comments do not provide anything and I'm sure they are against this community rules.
You said "my experience." I'd be glad to talk to you if you are a driver. I've done over 2000 rides (not a lot compared to other drivers I know) all over California. My anecdotal evidence isn't nonsense.
I did 2000 rides in a year. That works out to be about 8 rides a day. That doesn't seem so far fetched. You've already made up your mind so I don't know why you bother making comments to me.
I'm a retired programmer working in Silicon Valley. I'm like a kid in a candy store in some regards, such as I picked up one of the top VR developers in the world at the San Jose Convention Center and gave him a long ride. He was excited to talk about VR and convinced me to buy what he was working on. I did! I wouldn't be a shill if Uber/Lyft paid me. There's no fun in that. As I mentioned elsewhere, I really like messing around with their algorithms to see how they work. You can't subvert real enthusiasm, but nice try!
The number of rides isn't unbelievable. What is unbelievable is that 2000 rides by 1 person would render a data set that would scientifically support even a fraction of the claims in his original post.
OK, but we were always talking about anecdotal data in casual conversation right, not hardcore scientific analysis? I think even the original poster acknowledged that.
No he did not acknowledge that, please quote him if I missed it somehow. He presented a long list, as fact, and when questioned for a source he dodged the question, then when asked again he claimed he drove a lot one year. But the claims he's making are about other drivers and factors he simply could not determine as a single driver in a limited region. The original post, as it was written is absolute useless ignorance at best and active disinformation at worst.
Here is my problem with it (and I am generally in support of models of work that depend less on strict employer-employee relationships).
First, tailoring these rules for people like yourself who are retired (and presumably drive some on the side for fun / a bit of extra cash) has a similar effect to treating fast food jobs as being for teenagers working on the side when they go to school. It is both unrealistic, because most people doing those jobs use them as their primary sources of income, and encourages an attitude that they're not "real" jobs so they don't require this kind or protection.
Second and probably more relevant, the entire framework that governs relationships between either contractors and their customers / suppliers vs employees and their employers assumes that you are one or the other. For instance, in California, everyone gets a minimum of three days sick leave. That could have been setup to leave employers out of it and directly pay out something that has been deemed a social good from general taxation. The way it has been setup is that employers have to provide it. Those are basically the same (since society collectively pays for it either way) as long as everyone is an employee either directly or for a subcontractor.
A society decides that they want to assure certain things because they want them for themselves and each other or because they have decided that it is utility maximise to share everyone's downside risks. [I know that's not how most people think but it does provide a strong theoretical argument against self-insurance]. In the system currently operating in California, and indeed in most of those parts of the world where these protections have been agreed, the way we deliver them administratively is through mandates on employers. That's why we think of them as employment rights.
The problem then with the "gig economy" is that our system is not setup to deliver these minimum rights that we've agreed on as anything other than employment rights. So if we want to keep them, we can either:
-Radically transform the system in order to reach a "new settlement" where any rights we collectively want to be assured are handled by the state directly, and let the gig economy do whatever (since all work relationships will be effectively on the same terms regardless of whether they are "jobs" or not). That would mean barely any "employment rights" because if there was something we collectively wanted to safeguard we would collectively pay for it directly.
-Restrict what kind of work task we allow to be delivered without it becoming a "job" in the legal sense.
I would prefer option 1 but I am also a pragmatist and my second preference if we don't do that is to force certain relationships to be classified as employment in order to ensure that what we call "employment rights" are safeguarded.
I'm not sure why people have a hard time believing that some drivers should do something else. Not everyone is cut out for it. It takes a lot to get fired (deactivated) by Lyft or Uber. Meantime, the bad drivers just struggle along loudly complaining.
I know you may find this hard to believe, but some people like to help other people and be of service. I drive where I want and when I want. I don't have to pick anyone up. That's going to change if we have to be employees. Taking away freedom and forcing employees to follow restrictive rules is how to breed resentment. You're going to miss Lyft and Uber when it is gone and turns into a taxi company.
That's very true but the majority of the drivers are part timers like me. What will eventually evolve I think is a two tiered situation, where full timer employees will be held to a schedule and directed in their job in exchange for benefits while more casual people like me will be free without benefits.
I'm enthusiastic about the software that Uber and Lyft are developing to make this whole thing work so beautifully. I catch their algorithms making mistakes sometimes. I catch them doing something sneaky sometimes (Lyft more than Uber.) I have some ideas on how to make it work better. I've done 2000 rides and picked up some really interesting people. I like to go to different cities and try them out. It's fun. If my enthusiasm makes me a shill, then so be it.
Fair enough. Let me restate my concern in less fraught terms:
> "Up to 70% of drivers are like me and ... would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California."
This is a claim that has been widely promulgated by the big gig-economy companies in a wide-ranging PR campaign. Do you have any actual independently-verifiable data to support it, or are you just blindly repeating it to advance a political agenda that you just happen to support?
Lyft is sneaky. They sent me to a cemetary next to a busy area once when I was on the hwy going home and then cancelled the ride once I got to the cemetery. Then they messaged me and said as long as I was in a busy area, why didn't I wait? The thing that pissed me off was the algorithm actually directed me to drive into a cemetary on a dark night, as if someone was there waiting for me. Of course I didn't go in the cemetery. Another time Lyft indicated there was a busy bonus area a couple miles from the airport. I went there and waited and then noticed other drivers waiting. It wasn't a busy area. What Lyft was doing was parking us there because the airport waiting lot was full. Lyft also has several times cancelled trips right when I got there so I don't get paid. Uber doesn't play tricks like this. However, people who take Lyft are usually nicer people. Does it seem like a shill would say stuff like this? If you think so, then I can't help you.
Thousands of rides is not "without even a shred of data". You, on the other hand, have no data, yet seem to be very outspoken on the topic. If anyone is a bot in this conversation, it is you.
I am aware but if you actually look at the comments the author is posting about being an uber driver for 5 months or more interspersed with what seem like substantive comments.
The OP repeated a claim being made by the large gig companies without providing any references or actual data. If anything is lowering the level of discourse here it is parroting a politically-loaded factual claim ("Up to 70% of drivers are like me and ... would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California.") without citing any independently verifiable data to support it.
Asking how we can know the OP is not a shill just seemed like a less long-winded way to make that point. It was late.
My feeling on this sort of thing is that you can find a real person who supports virtually any political position. In opinion polling, 40% of the state’s voters support prop 22. That’s millions of people, and it shouldn’t be hard to believe that some of them are are techie Lyft drivers commenting here. Accusing them of being shills is bad argumentation and violates the rules of the community. They did already explain that they are driving for these companies, which is a good explanation for why they would know stats that the companies are peddling.
Mindfully exercising theory of mind to figure out why someone might honestly have a different opinion is always a useful practice. In the context of a debate, it will help you argue more convincingly. If you’re just trying to understand what’s happening in public opinion, it helps develop a more accurate world model.
As I was trying to clarify in my first reply to you, I was not taking the OP to task for expressing an opinion. I was taking him to task for making a factual claim without evidence, a factual claim that also happens to part of a PR campaign funded by one of the parties in the dispute. That makes the claim a priori suspect, and repeating it without a reference subject to valid criticism.
I will own the fact that I phrased my criticism inartfully at first (it was late), but I stand behind its substance as clarified here.
Most of the bullet points you listed are not a sign of bad drivers. Even you, were you a taxi driver, wouldn't take a long drive out of town if you weren't paid for the trip back, for example.
And yes, "my car my rules" because that is their car, and Uber imposes severe penalties for bad reviews.
"bad drivers" as in "not making money" drivers. When you go out of town you stay there and take rides or set your direction home and pick up rides in that direction. Drivers who say they don't get paid coming back are ignorant.
Stay as in? Spend the night? Just stay there on the curb side hoping for a chance that someone will need a ride back? How is that "making money"?
> or set your direction home and pick up rides in that direction
Drivers already do that. Additionally,
- A driver who lives west of town will not pick a ride to the east of town on the off chance that there will be a ride back if only he stays there long enough.
- A driver only needs to go home at the end of their shift. So why would he pick rides in the direction of his home at any other time? Hoping for a chance to pick a ride on the way back?
> Drivers who say they don't get paid coming back are ignorant.
As I've just demonstrated, it's not the drivers who are ignorant.
Or the drivers could be paid a wage and it wouldn't be a problem. It sounds like the current system for compensating drivers creates an incentive for bad service in this instance, not good.
>How is taking rides on the way home bad service
Does uber guarantee that there will be paying rides to bring you back home? Otherwise you are driving on your own dime
>Why should I get the same wage as a sub par driver
Because that's not how the world works. It isn't some meritocratic paradise that fairly pays people for their work.
Besides, nothing says uber can't pay you more for being a better fully employed driver. If you truly are a better driver, surely you could get a raise right?
As someone said (quoting from memory) "The greatest con corporate America has pulled is that poor people don't ask for better wages and job conditions, but get triggered when someone else asks for that".
Lets say I have a club I own, but I need to keep the riff raff out.
I cant openly ban poor or low society people from entering which would be considered "evil". But what if I mandated every service from a staff must be tipped with atleast 100$, because we value our workers more here.
This achieves the same purpose and I get to pretend to be egalitarian.
If this law is passed, ride sharing apps will still exist. They will have a smaller roster of higher quality of drivers and be more expensive to use. It will be perfectly fine for most of the people commenting here.
Who it will destroy is the "riff raff", the people at the lowest rungs of the ladder on both ends. Those who cannot contribute work of sufficient quality to be paid for full time work and benefits. And those who cant afford more expensive ride sharing.
Basically a way to ask people of a certain level to leave the state because they cant participate in the economy anymore and appear compassionate at the same time. Insidiously genius.
You seem to be suggesting that some people don't deserve full-time employment but should be allowed to carry out the same kind of work under worse conditions because, otherwise, those people have no other options. Endorsing systematic exploitation like this is truly worrying.
This gets even more problematic when these same hiring practices are normalized and exported to other industries where the same arguments are then made. The result would be a society where there are two classes of "employees" - those worth hiring because they are already better than most and those who aren't. This creates a feedback loop that traps the poor in poverty because they can't improve at the same rate as full-time employees.
Companies have a responsibility to train their employees so that they can "contribute work of sufficient quality". Making this entirely the problem of the workers until a certain standard is reached is really the "insidiously genius" ploy of companies in redefining their relationship with their workers. Transferring risk and investment in training entirely to the workers themselves is not a path towards a compassionate and equitable society.
Some people, in some jobs at least, aren't productive enough to support themselves. It's not about "deserve".
Some people have a lot of potential but need a chance to prove themselves and gain experience. Maybe they would start by bussing tables and eventually own their own restaurants. They need a ladder to success with rungs that are actually climbable.
If we mandate that you must be able to support a family of four and save for retirement to work bussing tables, we won't have prosperous people bussing tables. We'll just have more self-service restaurants, sit-down dining will become more of a luxury service, and we'll have more wait staff struggling because they have to have fewer tables that they have to bus themselves.
The training you yearn for can happen by virtue of the economics of the industry. It's like apprenticeship or interning. Except it's working at entry level jobs and earning advancement. And it's egalitarian because anybody can be an excellent busser. Not everyone can talk someone into funding their education on spec.
You're right, lots of exploitative jobs will be destroyed, and businesses will have to adapt. Thing is, they will adapt to the new market conditions, or else they'll be replaced by other businesses catering to the market's demands, or the market's demands will change.
In the painful transition period, lots of exploited "employed" people will become unemployed, and lots of businesses that can't survive without exploiting people will fail. That's the unfortunate "cancellation fee" we should pay before moving to a more ethical economy.
It's not exploitive to pay people a modest wage for modest productivity, especially if the role can be part of a successful career.
You also ignore the point that entry level jobs provide advancement opportunities that are sometimes better for disadvantaged folks (or even folks changing careers) compared to expecting them to (re)train at four year universities, etc.
People talk a lot about apprenticeship these days... Apprenticeships are entry level, low paid positions.
You're not wrong as long as the definition of "modest wage" isn't subjective and is instead collectively agreed within society (i.e. a minimum/living wage).
I think you're saying the same as this Economist article[0] which says that "the workers who are most vulnerable to losing their job as a result of the minimum wage are those whose productivity is low". Empirical data on this also shows, perhaps counter-intuitively, that a "minimum wage can sometimes lead to higher rather than lower employment".
Entry-level jobs are important but so is human dignity and freedom. I don't think you need to sacrifice one for the other here - we can (eventually) have both.
Why do companies have to train you? Is this law or God's mandate? Is there even evidence that providing some safety net for your employee somehow creates a better employee and/or company?
Ultimately this is about controlling others vs. not wanting others to control you. IMHO people need to fail in order to learn properly, and safety nets remove this risk which in turn also removes the learning, effectively preventing those who would otherwise be successful. We think we are helping workers by forcing them into some contract that is supposedly beneficial, but really people are the ones making those choices. Safety nets and forcing companies will just reinforce the bad decisions some people make and will affect the whole industry in the long run because quality will go down and prices up.
I got into software through a paid internship at a webdev company that was spinning out a startup on the side. The founders were great folk who invested a lot into the tech/startup scene in the city. They also invested in their employees and into me. Without them, I wouldn't have had the head-start that I did. I'm not suggesting that companies should be compelled to behave like this. I am saying that there's at least some social/ethical/civic responsibility a company has towards its employees.
If you've hired someone and they aren't doing a good enough job, it's in both of your best interests for that person to be trained and supported appropriately to help them improve. If they still aren't up to the job you should part ways but at least you've both tried to make it work. Employers and employees cooperating in the pursuit of aligned interests like this has nothing to do with control. Independently deciding what's good for people and how they will best learn sounds like it has a lot to do with control but that's what you're suggesting, not me.
I do agree that failure can sometimes be a great teacher. In my experience, the best work happens in places where it's acceptable to fail and where failures can be recovered from. Safety nets exist to allow for more risk and more failure, not less.
Of course it's better to train and all that, I'm saying it's probably not a good idea to somehow have a global solution to all kinds of relationship between every type of company and employee. Every industry and every company will have different solutions to what they need and they'll know best how to set their employees for success. This is all done in a mutual agreement. A better strategy is having everyone understand their options in order to make better decisions when it comes to choosing an employer/employee, and again all of this is specific to the industry.
The problem with fighting worker rights is that not all workers are the same, and having a small group of people decide all the intricacies of the system for all industries is unrealistic. At the very least there would be a concerted and visible effort to adapt solutions for each industry, but that's not what happens, it's always some global abstract mandate that has unintended consequences. Politics is the ultimate solutioning by committee, so it's always inefficient and often hurtful to use politics to solve societal problems which are really the collection of the decisions people are making. Encouraging businesses is one thing, but deliberately blocking actions and forcing decisions on ALL business is almost never a good idea.
> They [Uber and Lyft] don’t pay the cost of their capital.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
> These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
> This sharing economy shit works in a shitty economy. In a good economy, where people have what they need, it doesn’t work.
And it doesn't matter. Now it's a fully consensual relationship between Uber and the driver (and the customer), where everyone involved agrees to the terms voluntarily. The law changes that, and will simply result in the loss of jobs.
How much choice do the drivers have if that's where all the customers are?
It sounds to me like you're confusing the willingness of drivers to relent to market forces outside of their control for their consent. Some are definitely happier than others but none have the degree of agency you seem to suggest they do.
And someone can consent to working in a chemical plant without protection but OSHA won't let that happen. Worker rights need to be protected by law, or it is a race to the bottom for the working conditions of the poorest.
The number of special cased carve-outs is ridiculous - it's not a normal law.
Obviously AB5 was hacked together by some special interests (unions maybe - what is history?). It's totally unworkable. The carveouts that keep coming are the sign of this - how many are there now, anyone have the list?
And yes, I'm a maxed out dem donor. If AB5 is the way workers rights are going to be advanced we are hosed. I can think of 5 much easier, fairer, high impact approaches.
AB5 was written by the Teamsters - an multinational Syndicate who couldn’t include and collect Uber drivers membership fees unless they were actual employees.
Its main architect, Lorena Gonzales, is a Teamsters woman through and through, by her own admission.
This is so off base. It sounds like a regurgitation of a Red State post. If anyone wants to read about Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher, just check her Wikipedia page:
"Dude. I am a Teamster. I ran for office as an organizer and labor leader. I believe in unions to my core. Stand in solidarity with workers every single day. Bought & paid for? No... I am the union."
I'm not familiar with red state (I'm a maxed out dem donor BTW). I will look into Lorena a bit more though to confirm she is not labor involved. There was one other bill that had this same sort of ham fisted approach which turned out to be heavily union influenced, which is why I wondered about AB5 (ie, even highly liberal orgs struggle to operate within this bill FYI because even if you want to do right many things are just not possible with it).
> The number of special cased carve-outs is ridiculous - it's not a normal law.
I looked up AB5 [1] and read about the "carve outs" last time the topic came up, among several other. It's far shorter than other nontrivial bills and I couldn't find a single one that didn't specifically mention a superseding precedent or specialized State or Federal law that had supremacy regardless.
For example, the primary exceptions are driven by the Borello test from Borello & Sons, Inc. v. Dept. of Industrial Relations which is a California supreme court decision [2], the interaction between California and Federal fishing regulations [3], and a vast array of past state and federal regulations written for licensed professionals like lawyers, doctors, and even commercial truck drivers [4].
[2] (c) (1) Subdivision (a) and the holding in Dynamex do not apply to a contract for “professional services” as defined below, and instead the determination of whether the individual is an employee or independent contractor shall be governed by Borello if the hiring entity demonstrates that all of the following factors are satisfied: ...
[3] (ii) “Commercial fisherman” means a person who has a valid, unrevoked commercial fishing license issued pursuant to Article 3 (commencing with Section 7850) of Chapter 1 of Part 3 of Division 6 of the Fish and Game Code.
...
(C) On or before March 1, 2021, and each March 1 thereafter, the Employment Development Department shall issue an annual report to the Legislature on the use of unemployment insurance in the commercial fishing industry. This report shall include, but not be limited to, reporting the number of commercial fishermen who apply for unemployment insurance benefits, the number of commercial fishermen who have their claims disputed, the number of commercial fishermen who have their claims denied, and the number of commercial fishermen who receive unemployment insurance benefits. The report required by this subparagraph shall be submitted in compliance with Section 9795 of the Government Code.
[4] (8) (A) Paragraph (2) shall not apply to a subcontractor providing construction trucking services for which a contractor’s license is not required by Chapter 9 (commencing with Section 7000) of Division 3 of the Business and Professions Code, provided that all of the following criteria are satisfied ...
Please edit out swipes like "Have you actually read" and name-calling like "This FUD is nonsense". Those things destroy conversation and break the site guidelines, and your comment would be just fine without them.
What's your point? Yes, these carveouts all fall back to a version of the law that is much more lenient on the definition of an independent contractor. That should be obvious...if there wasn't any pre-existing law that defined contractor, businesses would make every employee a contractor.
AB5 can't override past precedent and Federal supremacy. That they didn't try is a sign of the bare minimum of legislative competency that I would expect from a legislature.
I couldn't get past the first few sections oF that soUrce, which incluDes nuggets like Or maybe AB 5 and Dynamex. Or maybe AB 5 and Dynamex and Borello. Or maybe just Dynamex.
The very recent Dynamex and the relatively old Borello decisions are California Supreme Court Cases that take precedence over California legislation baring a California Constitutional Amendment or sweeping labor reform. AB5 gets rid of ambiguities, not create them. That's why the intro to AB5 reads:
SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) On April 30, 2018, the California Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles (2018) 4 Cal.5th 903 (Dynamex).
AB5 is meant to bring state regulations in line with the courts, which just established new and important precedent for California labor law in Dynamex that created new ambiguities in a critical set of laws. That decision doesn't supersede Borello, which is a well litigated topic that any lawyer specializing in California labor law understands.
Thank you for the reference to AB2257 [0], I didn't know about it. A cursory scan implies that the legislature is responding to real situations like Vox Media's laying off of hundreds of journalists [1], more Borello (!) [2], some exceptions that reasonable people can argue is common sense or corruption [3], and a bunch of other boring stuff [4]. I don't have the time to really dig into the new bill but if you can name any specific section in either bill that you find particular egregious, I'm interested to know.
[1] This bill would delete the existing professional services exemptions for services provided by still photographers, photojournalists, freelance writers, editors, and newspaper cartoonists. The bill would, instead, establish an exemption for services provided by a still photographer, photojournalist, videographer, or photo editor, as defined, who works under a written contract that specifies certain terms, subject to prescribed restrictions. The bill would establish an exemption for services provided to a digital content aggregator, as defined, by a still photographer, photojournalist, videographer, or photo editor. The bill would establish an exemption for services provided by a fine artist, freelance writer, translator, editor, content contributor, advisor, narrator, cartographer, producer, copy editor, illustrator, or newspaper cartoonist who works under a written contract that specifies certain terms, subject to prescribed restrictions.
[2] 2776. Section 2775 and the holding in Dynamex do not apply to a bona fide business-to-business contracting relationship, as defined below, under the following conditions:
(a) If an individual acting as a sole proprietor, or a business entity formed as a partnership, limited liability company, limited liability partnership, or corporation (“business service provider”) contracts to provide services to another such business or to a public agency or quasi-public corporation (“contracting business”), the determination of employee or independent contractor status of the business services provider shall be governed by Borello, if the contracting business demonstrates that all of the following criteria are satisfied: ...
[3] (2) (A) “Referral agency” is a business that provides clients with referrals for service providers to provide services under a contract, with the exception of services in subparagraph (C).
(B) Under this paragraph, referrals for services shall include, but are not limited to, graphic design, web design, photography, tutoring, consulting, youth sports coaching, caddying, wedding or event planning, services provided by wedding and event vendors, minor home repair, moving, errands, furniture assembly, animal services, dog walking, dog grooming, picture hanging, pool cleaning, yard cleanup, and interpreting services.
(C) Under this paragraph, referrals for services do not include services provided in an industry designated by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health or the Department of Industrial Relations as a high hazard industry pursuant to subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3) of subdivision (e) of Section 6401.7 of the Labor Code or referrals for businesses that provide janitorial, delivery, courier, transportation, trucking, agricultural labor, retail, logging, in-home care, or construction services other than minor home repair.
[4] (7) “Interpreting services” means:
(A) Services provided by a certified or registered interpreter in a language with an available certification or registration through the Judicial Council of California, State Personnel Board, or any other agency or department in the State of California, or through a testing organization, agency, or educational institution approved or recognized by the state, or through the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters, National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters, International Association of Conference Interpreters, United States Department of State, or the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
(B) Services provided by an interpreter in a language without an available certification through the entities listed in subparagraph (A).
The legislature could modify existing laws and override precedent set by the courts, to the extent it is not unconstitutional. And the interpretation of what is a contractor or employee has largely not been a constitutional matter, it is about interpreting the vague, silent and conflicting labor laws. The Federal labor laws almost always explicitly allow states to set stricter limits, they do not preempt state laws via supremacy
AB5 is the stricter limit CA is setting, no? The legislature does have plenary power to "enforce a complete system of workers’ compensation" but no one's going to undertake the challenge of massive labor reform challenging Borello and the ABC test for Ubers' sake, especially when it's so contentious (for what it's worth, I'm slightly biased because of the fear it'll open the door to other labor law poison pills). AB5 brings the existing framework into spec with Borello/Dynamex and clarifies open questions.
That's why Uber, Lyft, et al have thrown almost $200 million behind the prop 22 marketing campaign. Even if the legislature overturns AB5, the core reasons behind the court's decision remain for future lawsuits to hammer home. AFAICT Uber's only hope is the CA Supreme Court not doing to Prop 22 what it did to Prop 8 or Federal reform. They're not going to get it from the state legislature.
A quick list (likely much more / more complicated than this) of carveouts I could find:
accountants
architects
cartographers
copy editors
dentists
direct sales salespersons
engineers
fine artists
fishermen working on an American vessel
freelance editors
freelance writers
insurance agents
insurance inspectors
investment advisers
landscape architects
lawyers
manufactured housing salespersons
musicians involved in sound recordings or musical
compositions
musicians with single-engagement live performances
newspaper cartoonists
photojournalists
podiatrists
private investigators
producers
professional foresters
psychologists
real estate appraisers
securities broker-dealers
still photographers
surgeons
translators
veterinarians
youth sports coaches
Industries with exemptions:
appraising
auditing
competition judging
copy editing and illustrations
digital content and feedback aggregation
home inspections
insurance underwriting inspections
international and cultural exchange services
landscape architecture
manufactured housing sales
master class performance
performing arts
recording arts and music
registered professional forestry
risk management and loss control
translation of documents
You make claims that this list is shorter than other non-trivial bills. I've worked in this space trying to get things right - this is BY FAR the hardest to implement law out there. A seller wants to sell their home, as part of that they pay out of escrow for an appraiser (normally handled as a contractor) to appraise the house. Under AB5 they had to HIRE that person as an employee in most cases - they are not even setup to run payroll!
An org wants to sponsor a "fellowship" for $1,000 or $2,000 to a student and have them attend an event / do a presentation. Can't do that under AB5, they can't be 1099'ed anymore, they are below exempt comp threshold, even if you pay them as non-exempt this student has to track their hours "working" for employer, get paid overtime etc. Reality - student doesn't want to track their hours, employer doesn't care and doesn't want to have to onboard and ramp up someone for a feel good thing like a $2,000 fellowship and program is cancelled.
You hire someone to write an article. Do you want them tracking their hours, do they? Will you hire them if you might have to pay for hours and overtime and missed meal breaks while someone is at home writing this article?
Reminder that the Democratic party, like all others, is an IRS-registered business, and like all others, has only one goal: to make money. It’s not a sacred oath to save the world. It’s a taco stand next to a hot dog vendor. They make money. Maybe they have a big customer. It’s probably not you. You’re a good customer but you’ll never eat a hot dog, so they don’t have to change their menu for you.
Regardless of how you feel about AB5, you should vote No on Prop 22 for one reason:
> Amending Proposition 22 would require a seven-eights (87.5%) vote in each chamber of the California State Legislature and the governor's signature, provided that the amendment is consistent with, and furthers the purpose of, Proposition 22. Changes that are not considered consistent with, and furthering the purpose of, Proposition 22 would need voter approval [0]
This means if the law passes with a simple majority, any future amendments require 87.5% of the legislature which is basically impossible.
This proposition re-writes the democratic process, not just the law. It manes Uber and Lyft get to decide not only what the law is today but how it evolves forever.
That's not how democracy should work and we should not pass this prop. If you believe drivers should be contractors, fine, but let's not hand over the government over that point.
The default for an approved CA ballot initiative is that it cannot be amended or repealed by the state legislature. Normally changing a ballot initiative requires another ballot proposition, so an initiative permitting the legislature to make changes with a seven-eighths vote is actually more amenable to changes than normal, not less.
The California Constitution has a clause that enables initiatives to determine whether they can be changed by the state legislature.
You may argue that this is weird, but it's how ballot initiatives work in California, so this one isn't rewriting the democratic process.
This has always been an interesting discussion morally. On one side, our free market should be able to allow any drivers to not work for any ride sharing company if they choose not to. On the other hand, the question I haven't been able to answer is if they truly have viable options or if the workers understand they are making under minimum wage. It's hard to balance between the freedom of choice and regulations to protect the people. At one point we (as in the US) decided child labor is unacceptable at the expense of household income dropping for the benefit of the future. Likewise, how much regulation are we willing to impose on the private market for the benefit of the workers and are there national growth consequences. I'm not sure how this will play out but it will be interesting to see.
> if the workers understand they are making under minimum wage.
The Uber workers most definitely are not making minimum wage. They actually see very well how much they’re making, and are not as gullible as HN likes to imply to not notice if they were ripped off.
It is common for people here to make argument that Uber drivers make less than minimum wage, but that typically proceeds on some very dubious assumptions, which throw the numbers way off. I don’t want to elaborate too much on nuances of actual operational costs vs IRS mileage rate, depreciation, financing and all that stuff, because there is a more obvious point.
Uber drivers can always rent a car from Hertz, which partners with Uber and will rent you a car for ~$250/week. This rate includes all maintenance and repair, so if drivers go this way, their only remaining significant costs are gas and insurance. At the and of the month, they can easily tally up the Hertz bill, their gas costs and their insurance payment, and compare with earnings. Suffice to say, it is above minimum wage, assuming they worked full time.
"Making minimum wage" in CA means minimum wage( for the whole time you are working, not just when you have a passenger) the employer paying a share of the taxes including unemployment, 3 days of sick leave a year if you work full time, being eligible for healthcare if you work full time(that you still have to pay for), and your employer reimbursing employer related expenses like mileage.
Sure, but then again, the Uber drivers know what their getting into. You might argue that they are underpaid, but it’s hard to argue that they are getting scammed or cheated: the arrangement is clear upfront, and the earnings follow not too long after.
But laws about minimum wage and employee rights are not optional. A company can't decide to offer a job below minimum wage and argue that the arrangement is clear upfront, and therefore ok.
If drivers can easily do that then honestly it shouldn't be difficult for Uber to move from a ridehailing company in California to a SAAS service provider, that is to say license the technology platform to companies that manage the drivers in a traditional way. (In fact that is literally how Uber operates in some European countries where drivers are already classified as employees).
And that is a very profitable business and healthy market actually the problem is just, Uber would have to give up its world domination plans and admit it's a software company, not the future of transportation
Uber obviously doesn't want it which is why they oppose it. but the law in a democratic society isn't supposed to be written by and for Uber, and the goal of the legislation is guaranteeing employee rights.
The argument just simply takes the wind out of the sails of Uber's best counter-argument, that they somehow would need to cease operations in the state and deprive customers of their service. They wouldn't, they can operate just fine as a software provider, they just don't get to eat the entire value chain. (which arguably apart from taking care of the employee issue also makes some sense from a competition standpoint).
I think you’re missing the point. Adding middleman changes nothing, because whatever that middleman could do, so can Uber itself. The argument Uber makes is that the drivers the existing arrangement is beneficial to all involved parties, and if they are required to hire drivers as employees, they won’t be able to offer as many rides as they do today with current prices, so both users will lose out on rides they are no longer able to buy, but also the drivers who now provide these rides won’t be able to. Regardless of whether this argument is any good, it is clear that adding middlemen won’t help here.
Actually that is incorrect. The Hertz deal does not cover all maintenance expenses, for example if you blow a tire on a pothole, you have to pay for it. There are a lot more of those exceptions in the fine print, so be sure to read it all!
Except what all the employment hawks ignore is that 70% of ride-share drivers don’t want to be employees. Number one concern is pay. Number two is autonomy. Benefits aren’t even a consideration.
This whole thing is about lawyers and the taxi industry. It’s bullshit.
Uber is far from perfect, but let’s make sure we raise every point when arguing about it.
But Uber/Lyft/Doordash etc can give them autonomy, they can make them true contractors.
I also doubt that the law forces companies to have a work schedule for their employees. From what I understand it just says that benefits are provided if employee works for more than certain amount of hours.
So to me it seems like it's all about exploiting their drivers (treating drivers like employees without providing advantages that employees have)
While it's true that the law doesn't force companies to assign shifts to employees, in practice, it's always the case.
The reason is because ultimately, scheduling shifts is going to be both easier to manage and more cost efficient than letting employees choose their own schedule.
Uber has a good idea of how many drivers they need at any given time. This ideal distribution of supply will never align perfectly with the supply pool's natural scheduling preferences. You can try to use economic incentives to force these two distributions to overlap, or you can just exert control (that you rightfully have over employees) and force your employees to work when you need them.
Are you sure about that? Because I worked with other contractors and they also had a schedule like me. The main difference was that they didn't get any benefits and could be let go immediately.
but you're saying shifts are scheduled because it is easier for companies. And that's actually true, if people work at the same time, it's easier to cooperate if a manager likes to micromanage it is also easier look at their screen making sure they are working.
The thing is that Uber et al prefers if there is no schedule and law actually doesn't stand in the way of that.
They could make drivers independent, allow them receive payments directly (if they chose so) and instead charge them for using their apps. Kind of like it is normally done.
>70% of ride-share drivers don't want to be employees
Firstly, is that backed up by data? Secondly, what is their reason for not wanting to be employees? Is it something about immigration law, exploitative employers or truly something about freedom?
Why is it so hard to believe drivers enjoy their freedom? They get to control their schedule. Turn the app on and off. Quit after two rides or drive for ten hours because the hits keep coming.
This is not exploitation. There’s a small number of drivers taking advantage of free lawyers backed by the taxi industry.
But more than anything. If you don’t like ride share don’t drive for ride share. Find a different job. Who said anyone has a right to demand a job to be created their way? Ride share works as it is. If you want a full-time with benefits go get a trucking job. There are a ton of those.
> Other ethnicities like Hispanic/Latino reported just 7.1% compared to the national average of 17.8%
Disclosure. I am not in the United States, I am no expert. But the over-representation of some groups may be what is wrong with that data. It could be that those people that were missed by the survey feel more exploited?
Across the pond in the UK it is not drivers welfare that is driving me to think they should be employees, but tax. In the UK being employed means your boss pays national insurance (a kind of tax). Secondly VAT (sales tax) is only charged by entities with sales over £85k ie not one driver on their own (making them much cheaper). However if they were employees the sales would be by Uber and subject to 20%VAT. HMRC finally got around to demanding this from Uber this week.
I am generally skeptical about the “market-ness” of the labor market. There are many situations in which people are not as free to switch jobs as a free-market proponent might want them to be. There is the obvious example of slavery, historical and modern, but many other groups are not able to experience any real free market for labor. One that comes to mind is miners, who often develop highly-specialized skills and live in areas with few other opportunities (I can highly recommend Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Henry Caudill if you’re interested in the details). I’m not sure if gig economy workers are in exactly the same boat, but be skeptical of free market claims when it comes to labor.
> I’m not sure if gig economy workers are in exactly the same boat, but be skeptical of free market claims when it comes to labor.
Gig economy workers have the freest movement of labor possible. If they get a better job tomorrow, they just take it...they don't even have to tell Uber. That's the whole point of the "gig" in Gig Economy.
Moreover, many people literally drive for Uber and for Lyft at the same time, to the extent that it's an issue in determining how company-sponsored accident insurance should be applied.
His point is that they're not "wage slaves". They can freely move to another minimum wage job. The fact that they don't indicates that Uber is a better deal.
If Uber and Lyft don't win their proposition, they can either agree to classify their drivers as employees, or some company that is willing to classify drivers that way will take over the market. People are commenting as if app-based ride share will no longer be available. It might cost more, but it wouldn't be much more.
> People are commenting as if app-based ride share will no longer be available. It might cost more, but it wouldn't be much more.
Uber lost $8.5 billion dollars in 2019. Think about that. Uber is losing the better part of a billion dollars every month. They are hemmorrhaging money at their current prices. It will cost a lot more for this to be profitable when you consider how much more expensive this will make the drivers.
This is ignoring how much more expensive it will be if the drivers are employees. I don't know how much that is, but I'd imagine in addition to those $2 it would likely add another 30% or so to the total cost (someone more knowledgeable please chime in with a better estimate). Of course that's assuming you're operating at Uber's scale (there are still overhead costs), but since prices go up you aren't, so now the prices need to go up even more!
I don't know where the equilibrium point is, I just know it's higher than what Uber is charging. My extremely hand-wavy guess is rides would need to cost around 50% more.
There's your problem. I think you need to go and research and see how much an employee costs to the employer in CA. In terms of taxes, overhead, accounting, insurance, and everything else CA demands.
If that was only in the US or other wealthy economies, maybe. But they're an international company. Some of those rides are in places where a $2 increase doubles the price of the ride. I think it would be more revealing to compare with their total receipts and see the % change that would be required.
> It might cost more, but it wouldn't be much more.
It will cost substantially more. Employment taxes and benefits alone add another 30% to Uber's cost structure. On top of that, paying drivers for downtime (which will be inevitable in an employment model) will add who knows how much more. I wouldn't be surprised if prices rise by 50%+ in suburbs.
But what about the driver who doesn't want to be classified as an employee? What right do they have?
Less trite - my nephew is in his mid-twenties and appreciates the flexibility that food delivery and ride sharing allows him. Is legislation that outlaws that an improvement?
What makes you think Uber and Lyft won't find ways for flexible employment? It's one of their big draws. I'd expect more faith in market-driven innovation here on HN.
I've been an independent contractor for large parts of my professional life; I think it can be a great setup when it's truly independent. But for decades companies have been ramping up fake contracting, where it's just employment but worse.
I always say this whenever this comes up, but, the number of duis since Uber has been operating have dropped precipitously. I don’t want to be on California roads late at night without Uber.
I don't care if uber can't pay back their VCs and goes under because of this ruling. There is a model that has shown to have a service people want and are willing to pay for, the market will find the right price with a different company. Drunk driving reduction has been a good thing about these services, but it doesn't need to be uber.
It could be that the market won't exist (or that the quality of service will diminish because of the lower network effects) if there isn't sufficient demand at a break even price post legislation.
I'm fine with raising the prices to something sustainable. There's no reason it has to be below minimum wage + the cost of maintaining the car.
What I'm not okay with is going back to the only option being a oddly smelling yellow cab that will only pick you up in the profitable parts of the city and refuses to take you parts of the city they deem unprofitable on the return trip.
I truly believe that Travis Kalanick has done more to stop drunk driving and end racism than any other for-profit company of the past two decades.
yeah, I hate Uber and Lyft more than most, but I have to admit that you're totally right about it being an unambiguous upgrade over taxi service
I used to get super angry every time I had to take a taxi in the Bay Area. Before I got in I'd say "OK, your credit card reader is working, right?" and they'd swear it is, and then wouldn't you know it? Somehow the machine broke down between the airport and my destination EVERY TIME. The drivers would pitch a hissy fit when I refused to pay cash, and then they'd manually take a print of my card or write down the number.
It cost something like $60 for a 20 minute ride, and they had the audacity to expect a huge tip on top of that. Fuck those guys.
I'm pretty sure they're all lying about their income and hiding it from the government to commit tax fraud. For a brief period before Uber took off, they'd even started using personal Square readers to charge credit cards instead of the official ones built into their cars.
That said, I'm willing to bet that society won't tolerate a return to how things used to be, even if Uber and Lyft leave the state after we shoot down Prop 22. There's such a vast gulf in price difference between a taxi and an uber that I'm sure we can reach a comfortable middle ground where drivers make a living wage without us living under a scumbag taxi rein of terror
Taxis basically predate the app boom. The world has changed a lot since 2011. I suspect that if Uber leaves, some scrappy people will be able make a simple app that does 90% of what Uber does that consumers actually care about, but without the need to pay back billions in VC funding
> I'll bet you could set up an actual marketplace with automated matchmaking > it probably wouldn't be as good as Uber/Lyft can make things by forcing "contractors" to take unprofitable rides, though
I think it's hard to tell what would happen. There's no reason that we would necessarily expect that uber drivers would not take lower wages for rides if they had to in a market.
It's hard to know whether Uber deflates the price of rides to keep demand high (and thereby steals surprlus from the drivers) or whether they inflate the price of rides to take a larger cut (and thereby steal surplus from riders).
Of course it's also hard to say whether if the price to the consumer went down the drivers would actually make more without Uber if the theoretical drop in price was less than the extra amount drivers get from Uber's previous cut.
> It's hard to know whether Uber deflates the price of rides to keep demand high (and thereby steals surprlus from the drivers) or whether they inflate the price of rides to take a larger cut (and thereby steal surplus from riders).
Do they do either of these? Their historical approach has been to subsidize the rides, which enriches both passengers and drivers at Uber's expense.
> There is a model that has shown to have a service people want and are willing to pay for, the market will find the right price with a different company
If the right price is more than outright owning a car I don't see how. Today I don't drive because I can uber. If ubers end up costing me more than $300 a month I'll just get a car.
After you remove the VC funny money subsidy, prices will probably be right around what taxis are today. And we'll be right back where we started. At least there's a nice phone application now and I don't need to call someone to send me a taxi.
Important caveat: the number of alcohol-involved deaths & injuries hasn’t really changed, so it could just be a change in the way those crimes are policed.
Yes, but it’s impossible to know how much of that is due to a change in policing. There’s a much less significant drop in the number of alcohol-involved car accident injuries.
If you are a tourist visiting multiple destinations a day that is probably already the case. Bay Area and LA are both spread out enough that rideshare fares quickly add up. Rideshare has always been more for convenience for me - not having to worry about parking or agonizing over traffic.
California is a huge state, and LA, Southern California is huge metropolitan area, so too is the San Francisco Bay area.
Public transportation is mostly buses and some amount of light rail, they are indeed options if you are only traveling short distances, otherwise they are not a timely option if they are any option at all.
Within the city of San Francisco, I mostly travel either by my own car, by walking, or by bus or light rail, but SF is very unique in California, but to get to places in the region, outside the city, public transit is not your best bet
I can only speak for SF. While SF does have a public transportation system it leaves a lot to be desired. It usually runs late or not at all. Sometimes it's faster to walk 40-50min than it is to wait for the bus to stop by.
SF is pretty much the best in the state overall for public transportation, except for maybe small portions of San Diego (like downtown or the UCSD area).
if SF is the best, i REALLY don't wanna see the worst. i've been to SF a bunch of times and every single time i have issues with the public transportation system.
If you are from Europe and you have never visited California, then you have a lot to learn about our crazy transportation. Most of California, and especially Southern California, is car-centric. Los Angeles was the first large city that was built up after the invention of the automobile, and it really shows. Living in LA without a car is a pretty atypical behavior.
I live in Australia where the car also reigns supreme. I would say there’s no decent public transportation anywhere in the country outside of the capital cities, and even then it really depends on where you live.
No they don't. Taxi drivers are exploited end-to-end. There's a reason why the medallions eclipsed a million dollars in price. The drivers have to lease their cars on a daily basis, and start at around $160 leasing fee in the hole. They're driving for many hours before they start making any money at all. That's not "power and control", that's getting totally screwed. And every Uber or Lyft driver who has ever driven taxis before will tell you that.
Have you actually talked to taxi drivers about this? Pre-plague, I've talked with hundreds about their views on their work, and at least dozens about Uber. Were cab companies beloved? Mostly not. Did drivers see themselves as being "totally screwed"? Definitely not. And they almost universally despise Uber.
The daily vehicle rental approach in their eyes has advantages. Number one is zero capex. Number two is predictable, controllable opex. Number three is a hard cap on the number of drivers on the road, meaning they have a good idea of the supply/demand balance. Number four is competition; if they didn't like one cab company, they could switch to a variety of others. And number five is regulation: if they were having issues with a cab company, they could take it up with the taxi commission.
Contrast this with Uber/Lyft, which is a dupoly with almost no regulation, few constraints, and which has shifted core capex and opex onto drivers, as well as most of the risk. With power and incentive to push driver pay well below sustainability. And of course a history of labor exploitation and the willingness to spent approximately infinite money to lock that exploitation into law.
I have talked with quite a number of former Uber drivers. And I've kept an eye on the declining amount Uber drivers are making, and how Uber has shifted much of their business risk to the working poor.
You might consider that an Uber driver is not going to be frank with an Uber customer about how shitty Uber is. Or frank with themselves, honestly.
I don't know about other major cities in California, but in San Francisco, taxi medallions were free until Gavin Newsom decided to "monetize" them in 2010. After that the city sold them for $250,000 each while providing low interest loans (via a local credit union) so drivers could pay for them. When Uber and Lyft arrived, their drivers didn't need medallions and there were no limits on how many drivers either company could have on the street. The medallion system collapsed and those who took out loans for them did indeed end up getting screwed.
They were "free", but they've always been supplied lower than demand (that is, the number of permits grew slower than the population's need for taxis did), an arrangement that worked well for cab drivers since it allowed less competition, and a profitable secondary market for the medallions. Lyft/Uber/etc gutted that demand.
Not saying 'good' or 'bad', just, you can't blame the city for the price of the medallion; it already had a high one due to the demand outstripping the supply. Makes sense that the government would seek to profit when it supplies them, given that.
>Not saying 'good' or 'bad', just, you can't blame the city for the price of the medallion; it already had a high one due to the demand outstripping the supply. Makes sense that the government would seek to profit when it supplies them, given that.
I can certainly blame the city for letting the demand exceed the supply. Irrespective of 22 Uber et all was a well deserved comeuppance for the taxi industry.
>while providing low interest loans (via a local credit union) so drivers could pay for them
That's better than most predatory lending around these medallions in other cities.
>The medallion system collapsed and those who took out loans for them did indeed end up getting screwed.
Unless there was some wording in the medallion law that would prohibit competitors from entering the market or set a buy-back value, I don't think anyone was screwed. Risky assets imply... Risks!
Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
Also, the argument on Uber/Lyft drivers not being contractors since they can't set their own rates and decide which ride they take strikes me as weird since medallion drivers were contractors, had to charge the price set by the city and could only pick-up customers in the (arbitrary) zones covered by their medallions.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
No doubt, many taxi drivers have been getting screwed over by the current and pre-ride-sharing state of the industry.
I'm a big believer in incentives and how they influence behavior.
For better or worse, ride sharing systems have put drivers in a situation where they have to provide amazing customer service, and due to supply pressures, the price has been falling to levels that make it difficult to make a living.
Before ride-sharing came along, cities had set the rates to protect customers from being gouged. I think they can safely remove the ceiling now. They may have to set a minimum per-mile rate to protect drivers now (if they aren't doing already doing so).
> the price has been falling to levels that make it difficult to make a living
I'm really curious to know how much drivers are making. I recall when Uber arrived, a lot of guy driving taxis (not medallion owners but renters) were really happy to switch over.
AB5 has this paternalist (and somewhat racist) undertone that drivers are too stupid to know how much it costs them to operate their business.
Taxi drivers have unions through which they have pressurized government to create unusual barriers to entry. Thus they become rent seekers.
Also in many cities like NY, the taxi driver is not the owner of the taxi badge, since a badge costs upward of $300K it is often owned by some rich guy/company and taxi driver is basically a contractor treated even worse than Uber and Lyft's drivers.
California's move to force Uber to change agreements of its employment is nothing but a move to create new kind of rent seekers.
This ruling could pave the way for a model that is good for everyone. As of now the gig economy exploits the poor[0]. Unless you think making 70% less than minimum wage is fair.
It's incredibly hard for me to consider this exploitation when people are freely entering into these agreements. I would not accept 70% less than minimum wage, and I'm sure these workers would all prefer to make more than 30% of minimum wage, but they have an entire labor market of other options and they have decided that this is their best option. The onus should be on you to explain why you think it's better that these jobs not be available to them at all.
If people deserve some minimum standard of living, why should only employed people deserve that minimum standard? I don't see why gig economy employers are the ones getting the blame here. Surely our legislature is to blame for allowing people to have such a low standard of living that they feel forced to accept such terrible jobs.
> It's incredibly hard for me to consider this exploitation when people are freely entering into these agreements.
But then
> they have an entire labor market of other options and they have decided that this is their best option
So obviously the problem was that the labor market was broken if the best they could find was that?
> Surely our legislature is to blame for allowing people to have such a low standard of living that they feel forced to accept such terrible jobs.
Agree, this is definitely a 2 way problem. But I think it should be attacked from both sides: Unemployment benefits, healthcare for unemployed and so on should be so good that people don't take the worst jobs. But also: employers should be forced to offer such good employments that the worst jobs simply don't exist. The end result, and a measure of success here would be a higher unemployment. Having a low single-digit unemployment isn't a mark of success.
> employers should be forced to offer such good employments that the worst jobs simply don't exist?
But why? Two people come to an agreement. Who are you to say that you know what they want better than they do?
I don't want to claim that this argument applies to all situations, there are some genuinely non-consensual or otherwise exploitive arrangements that the government ought to ban, but if someone wants what looks to me like a bad job why should I stop them from taking that job?
Before COVID I used to frequent a coffee shop where everyone needed to bus their own tables. The cost of labor in SF is so high that it's not reasonable to pay someone to bus the tables. While there I would frequently see a man outside who was clearly homeless. I'm sure he would have happily accepted less than minimum wage to bus the tables, but it's a moot question because that kind of relationship is banned, it's "exploitive". I'm not sure he's happier being unemployed than he would be being "exploited".
> A measure of success here would be a higher unemployment
I'm roughly with you on this. Technically, unemployed means looking for a job and unable for find one so high unemployment will always be a bad thing. But yes, when fewer people accept bad jobs we'll know that everyone is being taken care of.
> But why? Two people come to an agreement. Who are you to say that you know what they want better than they do?
That's an idea that is centered around individual freedoms rather than maximizing the utility for the most people. This is simply a political/ethical conflict.
My reasoning works like this: I want a functioning labor market, where "functioning" means that the worst jobs are good jobs. So I want my lawmakers to ensure it. I'm happy for them to severely reduce my freedom to make agreements as an employer or employee in that process.
> The cost of labor in SF is so high that it's not reasonable to pay someone to bus the tables. While there I would frequently see a man outside who was clearly homeless.
This problem has 2 solutions 1) let people take worse jobs 2) make social security nets better. Both are required. I can't stress this enough: any change to the labor market laws must come with corresponding changes to welfare.
My view that even the worst jobs should be good jobs is of course coupled with an understanding that this potentially raises the equilibrium unemployment by a lot, so it it obviously follows that I also believe society (i.e. my tax money) should take care of everyone in society who is unemployed. There is an inconsistent viewpoint here: and that would be the one where you think there shouldn't be a massive social safety net but also people shouldn't be allowed to take low-paying jobs. To be clear, that's not what I think. I think the idea of "the worst jobs being good jobs" is a good goal, and that it also must be coupled with a large social safety net.
I realize that social safety net isn't in place in California - so arguing for the change to labor laws is, at least, arguing the for the inconsistent state - but it's hopefully something that can be addressed next. One thing would have to come first.
Thanks for elaborating, I think we're mostly in agreement.
In the current world where there is no good safety net I'm saddened by laws like AB5 which do not seem to maximize utility for the most people, they only maximize utility for the people who are valuable enough to their employers, leaving a large class of people unemployable. But it sounds like we actually agree about this.
We disagree slightly in that I think even in the world where everyone is taken care of people should be allowed to accept bad jobs. It's actually useful for us to allow this! If more people start accepting bad jobs again it's a sign that the safety net is failing and should be improved.
But if that world was not an option I would mostly happily live in the world you're describing, where bad jobs were banned but there was a robust safety net.
> So obviously the problem was that the labor market was broken if the best they could find was that?
How does this imply that it's broken? Economies at their core are systems to distribute scarce resources. It's entirely possible (bordering on likely given pandemic) that this is the best employment opportunity for many drivers.
> The end result, and a measure of success here would be a higher unemployment.
> that this is the best employment opportunity for many drivers.
The best opportunity being a bad one was my reason for calling it "broken".
> Uh, ok
Unemployment alone wouldn't be a measure of a good labor market, but a good labor market can have high unemployment as an expected side effect. It's only a "better" situation, if the unemployed people are better off in that labor market too (i.e. social safety nets exist).
I don't quite understand what you're saying. If I'm understanding you right then you don't quite understand what I'm saying.
My claim is that it's disingenuous to say that Uber is exploiting their workers. If you think these are terrible conditions that nobody would ever work under unless they were being coerced you have to grapple with the fact that nobody is coercing anybody to become Uber drivers.
If you think that these are immoral working conditions then what you really believe is that a large chunk of our society is immorally made to live in poverty, and you're blaming Uber but how could this be Uber's fault?
If someone has genuinely decided to accept work for $4/hr and this shocks you so much that you're demanding Uber give them more, you should also be shocked that so many people are currently earning $0/hr if you have any hope of having a consistent worldview.
When seen from this lens the whole argument over SB 5 and Prop 22 makes no sense at all. Stop focusing on Uber, ask your legislators to stop focusing on Uber, and to start attempting to solve the real problem.
I think I hear you. Let people do what they want. Caveat emptor.
Here is what I am saying.
Imagine you're very poor and have a son who isn't very smart. He comes home excited about a new "job" washing the neighbor's car for $2 every other weekend because it means he'll be able to go to Disneyland this summer. Summer rolls around and it turns out he only made a quarter each wash because he had to replace his bike tires riding to and from the neighbor's house, and pay for soap and rags and stuff. You go to the neighbors and they tell you "tough shit" because your kid was too dumb to realize not even Mr Clean himself could make it to Disneyland washing cars for $2, and that the whole game was rigged from the start. Your neighbor just wanted a clean car without having to pay for it. Then after all this drama, they're texting your son that he should keep washing the cars for $2 because washing it for $10 isn't in his best interest.
In another part of this thread I mention that there are some genuinely non-consensual or otherwise exploitive agreements which we are right to ban; the situation you're describing seems to veer into that territory.
To the extent that your counterparty lies to you about your future take-home pay that is fraud and is already illegal whether you're an employee or a contractor. To the extent they strongly imply you'll be taking home $2 per week or that you'll be able to afford Disneyland, well aware neither are true, that is likely also fraud.
To the extent that someone is genuinely dumb and naive it seems easier to legally put them into an exploitative situation but I reject the notion that this is an accurate description of most Uber drivers.
You have brought up a good point, the system I'm imagining doesn't have a good solution for people who are dumb and naive and who unknowingly put themselves into exploitive situations. Luckily I don't think there are many people like this, hopefully they have a network of friends/family guiding them, and hopefully the safety net I'm describing puts some bounds on their downside: by picking a bad job they might not make it to Disneyland but at least they won't make it into poverty.
> Do you think they'd still sign up if Uber was upfront about only paying ~$4/hr?
Do you think that people would continue to work for Uber after the first month if they were really earning $4/hr when they could walk into a fastfood chain and earn minimum wage?
So either your number is wrong, or the answer is yes. Either way, you're not arguing for what you think you are.
People used to "freely enter" agreements to work for pennies per hour, or to die while building the Hoover dams and the railroads. Are you saying that worker protections are all unnecessary because people freely enter their employment?
IMO, just because someone will work for $4 per hour, doesn't mean that it's ethical for the company to pay them that rate, or that it's desirable to have a society in a race to the bottom. ideally, the wage would be more in line with the actual value that the worker brings in
That's exactly what's going to happen, though. Uber and Lyft are not very profitable so they can't actually afford to increase wages or benefits out of their own pockets. If they increase prices, the market will shrink, so drivers won't have work.
The alternative scenario is that either Uber/Lyft or another company abides by the rules, and deliver the same service with hired employees. The demand is there. Yes, it will become a bit more expensive for the consumer, but that price difference, is what it costs to give decent benefits and rights to workers.
That's not true. The demand is there because the cost makes sense. I had a car, but after considering the cost of owning (and parking) that car, I found that I was better off not having a car and relying on Uber when I need to get somewhere that requires a car. If that math no longer makes sense, I'll probably go back to driving.
I take it as a "no". You nor California's government have no better options for them.
> The alternative scenario...
Another scenario is that Uber hikes prices, people cease to use their services because they are too expensive, and the company fails, and all these drivers lose their jobs, and customers lose the service, which will double-hurt the working class because rich people can afford their own cars and/or expensive taxis.
The drivers are not exploited. Had their have better options, they would be working elsewhere. You want to help them, give them better options, make opening business easier and so on. Not kill their options.
Ehh... I'm wasting my time... Socialists are the worst enemy of the people the claim to want to protect.
If workers get paid more in benefits and "rights," more people will become rideshare drivers. And then pay will get pushed down, until the work is just as undesirable as it is now, only differently undesirable, because the compensation is in the form of benefits and "rights," instead of cash that the driver can spend however they want.
Your alternative scenario isn't entirely correct either. Yes, the workers you see will be paid more and they will appreciate the labor protections. However, there will be a number of people whom you will not see, because they will no longer be employed at all.
Exactly. Employment and benefits requirement will completely eliminate part-time and flexible-hours workers, and other people that were really benefiting from this type of work.
I'd be very surprised if this turns out to be true. Ridesharing is competing with public transit, personal vehicles, walking, etc. If prices significantly increase, the market size will go back to what it was before Uber.
It doesn't make a difference. AB5 is the law; it was on hold until the outcome of prop 22. With or without this court decision, if 22 doesn't win Uber and Lyft either have to reclassify their drivers or their drivers will work for some other company that is willing to comply. What is not a possibility is that app-based ride applications will disappear. There's a market, people want the service, and the current drivers want to provide it.
Would this even be a problem if we didn't tie benefits like healthcare to employment?
It certainly would take a lot of the administrative burden off startups and free up more people to consider starting or joining one if healthcare weren't at risk.
I think it's safe to say many Californians should start preparing for life without ride-share. Assuming Prop 22 does not pass, the most likely outcome seems to be Uber and Lyft will simply shut down operations for the time being, if not for good. They have already signaled they are willing to do this before this appeal, and they are explicitly saying this is the most likely outcome in the media.
The philosophies of both sides have been debated ad nauseam. Regardless of what side you take, the reality is these new regulations are effectively going to get many drivers 'fired'. I don't hear much discussion about this. It seems folks on the side of making them employees can't imagine a world where Uber and Lyft will simply shut down.
Of course, those who are anti prop-22 have the drivers best interests in mind, but nobody's lives will be improved if they are denied the ability to work at all. We have to take that into account.
What happens when 22 fails, and all those drivers are out of work? What happens when millions of users who are used to being able to dial up fast, affordable rides on the drop of a hat, suddenly lose this ability? It's going to be painful for all parties involved.
What happens? Either a) uber backs down from their bluff, and actually pays people, or b) a new company will fill the void, or c) uber lays off more of its bloated white collar workforce who provide little marginal value to the consumer
It is incredibly alarmist to say that we won't be able to use an app to hail a ride anymore.
The article states "The case emerged after California implemented a law, known as AB5, aimed at reclassifying ride-hail, food delivery and other app-based workers as employees entitled to benefits such as unemployment insurance and minimum wage."
What's relevant for HN is that this is not the full list: if you are a freelancer, or if you are a company that hired California freelancers, you are out of business in California.
I really don't get why these companies are so resistant to make them employees. No one can force them to pay rich benefits. Employer taxes only cost 10%. If Walmart, Starbucks, Chipotle, Amazon can do it so can they.
Wow, until reading this comment, I had never really thought about the fact that Uber is claiming they'll go out of business if they're required to give WALMART-level worker protections. race to the bottom...
Don't drivers decide when to work, just open the app and login or whatever and start driving?
IANAL and have UK perspective (and AFAIK they remain independent contractors here, but I'm not sure if it's settled) but to me, (IANAJudge though..) that's a sufficient test for the difference between zero hours contract employee and independent.
They're not getting given their hours for the week (right?) they're just showing up and working.
It's not necessarily obvious, but the legal definition of an employee in CA has little to do with whether or not you pick your hours. According to dynamax, an independent contractor must:
- be free from the control of the employer AND
- be performing work that is unrelated to the company's core business AND
- have an independent career in the field of the work they perform
If uber/lyft doesn't allow their drivers to price themselves and not treat them as employers, they are more or less a cartel rather than a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of a service.
Maybe they can show a optimal price and allow drivers to change that and charge drivers for the customers they get from the platform.
Important victory for workers everywhere. Drivers is only one if the first areas where gig companies tries to avoid rules and regulation on worker protection, rights and benefits, by making employees into contractors. I hope we can get similar legislation introduced here in Denmark.
I think Uber/lyft thought that self driving cars would arrive earlier than these regulations. Now they have to face a great difficulty to adapt to the new environment
It’s a little off topic, but today you can get a self driving ride in Las Vegas through the Lyft app. Two safety drivers sit up front though so it’s not driverless.
Some differences that come to mind: no scheduled shifts, no uniform, much less control over how workers service customers, ability to set your own rate. I'm sure there are more.
If they pull out, some other company willing to abide by the rules will probably appear to fill the gap, with the same service, but in terms where workers aren’t exploited.
> Remedying those harms more strongly served the public interest
I hate reporters using this language to describe court opinions. It’s a legal term of art that makes decisions sound political.
The judge ruled based on the law. Lawmakers balance public interest. Yes, the court furthers that through its work, but it isn’t actively creating the scales by which to weigh these parties’ interests.
From the ruling, p. 62: "In sum, our assessment is as follows. The trial court found that rectifying the various forms of irreparable harm shown by the People more strongly serves the public interest than protecting Uber, Lyft, their shareholders, and all of those who have come to rely on the advantages of online ride-sharing delivered by a business model that does not provide employment benefits to drivers." Reporters simply paraphrased the court's opinion.
Are you basing this on anything other than the ideal that we Americans are taught about how courts work? In practice, a reasoned argument can be made for two or more interpretations of law and judges are often entirely "political".
One of the great distinctions between natural languages and programming languages is that programming languages have comparatively little ambiguity — because computers do not have the capacity to consider external context when interpreting the intention of the programmer, and thus cannot resolve ambiguous constructs.
You'd hope that tech folks, from constantly having to accommodate this defect of computers, would develop a sophisticated appreciation for ambiguity. Instead, it seems that the ability to appreciate nuance atrophies.
Legal language may be more formalized than everyday language, but there is still lots and lots of ambiguity. The idea that there is a single correct interpretation of "the law" is nothing more than collective self-deception.
The distinction between natural language and programming languages is interesting, given the push towards machine learning and programming 2.0 that switches explicit instructions in code for training using examples.
AB5 was very clear about how Uber and Lyft drivers should be classified. There wasn't any ambiguity and it wasn't a hard case.
If Prob 22 wins, then that part of AB5 is overruled. If not, drivers are employees entitled to minimum wage and everything else employees are entitled to.
Uber and Lyft are now doing everything they can to get it to pass which will set up its own court fight.
Watching this fight I wonder "Who is in charge of governing California?" is it the Legislature/Governor or is it special interests who can spend enough to put bespoke laws into effect and make bespoke changes to the state constitution?
California didn't help itself when it implemented term limits which had the unpleasant side effect of never having any legislators with enough experience in the job to know how to really get things done, and so the "work" of writing laws has also fallen to special interests. This has never been more clear than the last 4 years where California has had a single party in both houses, and a Governor and still cannot legislate anything that special interests oppose.
I don't know what the "solution" would be but it does not feel like it is serving the people of California well (as someone who lives here).